PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED

PAULO FREIRE

In Paulo Freire’s hands literacy is a weapon for social change. Education once

again becomes the means by which men, can perceive, interpret, criticize and

finally transform the world about them.

Freire’s attack on the ‘culture silence’ inhabited by the vast numbers of illiterate

pep-ants in Brazil’s poorest areas has contributed in an extraordinary Way .to the

development of a sense of purpose and identity among the oppressed and

demoralized majority. His work is the result of a process of reflection in the midst

of a. struggle to create a new social order. His is the authentic voice of the Third

World, but his methodology and philosophy are also important in the’

industrialized countries where a new culture of silence threatens to dominate an

over consuming and over managed population, where education too often means

merely socialization. In contrast, Freire’s approach concentrates upon the ability to

deal creatively with reality.

Of all those currently writing and thinking about education Paulo Freire may

well be finally the most influential. Speaking from and for the Third World, and

implicitly for all underprivileged people, he proposes a view of education as

something positive and also hazardous, a means of liberating people and enabling

them to participate in the historical process. His Cultural Action for Freedom is

also available from Penguin Education and is published simultaneously.

Freire contributes a compassion for the wretched of the earth within an

intellectual and practical confidence and personal humility. He was a professor of

the philosophy of Education and is someone who can imagine alternatives and

initiate action.

MOST of all Paulo Freire has a vision of man. With our systems of education and

their lack of shared purposes and a common vision, that may be the most

fundamental of all the problems that he poses for us.

Foreword

In the course of a few years, the thought and work of the Brazilian educator

Paulo Freire have spread from the North East of Brazil to an entire continent, and

have made a profound impact not only in the field of education but also in the

overall struggle for national development. At the precise moment when the

disinherited masses in Latin America are awakening, from their traditional lethargy

and are anxious to participate, as subjects, in the development of their countries,

Paulo Freire has perfected a method for teaching illiterates that has contributed, in

an extraordinary way, to that process. In fact, those who, in learning to read and

write, come to a new awareness of selfhood and begin to look critically at the

social situation in which they find themselves, often take the initiative in acting to

transform the society that has denied them this opportunity of participation.

Education is once again a subversive force.

In the United States, we are gradually becoming aware of the work of Paulo

Freire, but thus far we have thought of it primarily in terms of its contribution to

the education of illiter-ate adults in the Third World, If, however, we take a closer

look, we may discover that his methodology as well as his educational philosophy

are as important for us as for the dis-possessed in Latin America. Their struggle to

become free subjects and to participate in the transformation of their society is

similar, in many ways, to the struggle not only of blacks and Mexican-Americans,

-but also of middle-class young people. And the sharpness and intensity of that

struggle in the developing world may well provide us with new insight, new

models, and a new hope as we face our own situation. For this reason I consider

the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in an’ English edition to be

something of an event.

Paulo Freire’s thought represents the response of a creative mind and sensitive

conscience to the extraordinary misery and suffering of the oppressed around him.

Born in 1921 in Recife, the centre of one of the most extreme situations of poverty

and underdevelopment in the Third World, he was .soon forced to experience that

reality directly. As the economic crisis in 1929 in the United States began to affect

Brazil, the precarious stab-ility of Freire’s middle-class family gave way and he

found himself sharing the plight of the ‘wretched of the earth’. This had a profound

influence on his life as he came to know the gnawing pangs of hunger and fell

behind in school because of the listlessness it produced; it also led him to make a

vow, at the age of eleven, to dedicate his life to the struggle against hunger, so that

other children would not have to know the agony he was then experiencing.

His early sharing of the life of the poor also led him to the discovery of what he

describes as the ‘culture of silence’ of the dispossessed. He came to realize that

their ignorance and lethargy were the direct product of the whole situation of

economic, social, and political domination - and of the paternalism - of which they

were victims. Rather than being encouraged and equipped to know and respond to

the concrete realities of their world, they were kept ‘submerged’ in a situation in

which such critical awareness and response were practically impossible. And it

became clear to him that the whole educational system was one of the major

instruments for the maintenance of this culture of silence.

Confronted by this problem in a very existential way, Freire turned his attention

to the field of education and began to work on it. Over the years he has engaged in

a process of study and reflection that has produced something quite new and

creative in educational philosophy. From a situation of direct engage-ment in the

struggle to liberate men and women for the creation of a new world, he has reached

out to the thought and experi-ence of those in many different situations and of

diverse philo-sophical positions: in his words, to ‘Sartre and Mounier, Eric Fromm

and Louis Althusser, Ortega Y. Gasset and Mao, Martin Luther King and Che

Guevara, Unamuno and Marcuse’. He has made use of the insights of these men to

develop a pers-pective on education which is authentically his own and which

seeks to respond to the concrete realities of Latin America

His thought on the philosophy of education was first expressed in 1959 in his

doctoral dissertation at the University of Recife, and later in his work as Professor

of the History and Philosophy of Education in the same university, as well as in his

early experiments with the teaching of illiterates in that same city. The

methodology he developed was widely used by Catholics and others in literacy

campaigns throughout the North East of Brazil, and was considered such a threat to

the old order that Freire was jailed immediately after the military coup in 1964.

Released seventy days later and encouraged to leave the country, Freire went to

Chile, where he spent five years working with UNESCO and the Chilean Institute

for. Agrarian Reform in programmes of adult education. He then acted as

consultant at Harvard University’s School of Educa-tion, and worked in close

association with a number of groups engaged in new educational experiments in

rural and urban areas. He is presently serving as Special Consultant to the Office of

Education of the World Council of Churches in Geneva.

Freire has written many articles in Portuguese and Spanish, and his first book,

Educaao como Pratica da Liberdade, was published in Brazil in -1967. His latest

and “most complete work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is the first of his writings to

be published in the United States.

In this brief introduction, there is no point in attempting to sum up, in a few

paragraphs, what the author develops in a number of pages. That would be an

offence to the richness, depth, and complexity of his thought. But perhaps a word

of witness has its place here - a personal witness as to why I find a dialogue with

the thought of Paulo Freire an exciting ad-venture. Fed up as I am with the

abstractness and sterility of so much intellectual work in academic circles today, I

am ex-cited by a process of reflection which is set in a thoroughly historical

context, which is carried on in the midst of a struggle to create a new social order

and thus represents a new unity of theory and praxis. And I am encouraged when a

man of the stature of Paulo Freire incarnates a rediscovery of the human-izing

vocation of the intellectual, and demonstrates the power of thought to negate

accepted limits and open the way to a new future.

Freire is able to do this because he operates on .one basic assumption: that

man’s oncological vocation (as he calls it) is to be a subject who acts upon and

transforms his world, and in so doing moves towards ever new possibilities of

fuller and richer life individually and collectively. This ‘world’ to which; he relates

is not a static and closed order, a given reality which man must accept and to which

he must adjust; rather, it is a problem to be worked on and solved. It is the material

used by man to create history, a task which he performs as he overcomes that

which is dehumanizing at any particular time and place and dares to create the

qualitatively new. For Freire, the resources for that task at the present time are

provided by the advanced technology of our Western world, but the social vision

which impels us to negate the present order and demon-strate that history has not

ended comes primarily from the suffering and struggle of the people of the Third

World.

Coupled with this is Freire’s conviction (now supported by a wide background

of experience) that every human being, no matter how ‘ignorant’ or submerged in

the ‘culture of silence’ he may be, is capable of looking critically at his world in a

dialogical encounter with others. Provided with the proper tools for such an

encounter, he can gradually perceive his personal and social reality as well as the

contradictions in it, become conscious of his own perception of that reality, and

deal critically with it. In this process, the old, paternalistic teacher - student

relationship is overcome. A peasant can facilitate this process for his neighbour

more effectively than a ‘teacher’ brought in from outside. ‘Men educate each other

through the mediation of the world.’

As this happens, the word takes on new power. It is no longer an abstraction or

magic but a means by which man discovers himself and his potential as he gives

names to things around him. As Freire puts it, each man wins back his right to say

his own word, to name the world.

When an illiterate peasant participates in this sort of educa-tional experience, he

comes to a new awareness of self, has a new sense of dignity, and is stirred by a

new hope. Time and again, peasants have expressed these discoveries in striking

ways after a few hours of class: ‘I now realize I am a man, an educated man.’ ‘We

were blind, now our eyes have been opened.’ Before this, words meant nothing to

me; now they speak to me and I can make them speak.’ ‘Now we will no longer be

a dead weight on the cooperative farm.’ When this happens in the process of

learning to read, men discover that they are creators of culture, and that all their

work can be creative. ‘I work, and working I transform the world.’ And as those

who have been completely marginalized are so radically transformed, they are no

longer willing to be mere objects, responding to changes occurring around them;

they are more likely to decide to take upon themselves the struggle to change the

structures of society which until now have served to oppress them. For this reason,

a distinguished Brazilian student of national development recently affirmed that

this type of educa-tional work among the people represents a new factor in social

change and development, ‘a new instrument of conduct for the Third World, by

which it can overcome traditional structures and enter the modern world.

At first sight Paulo Freire’s method of teaching illiterates in Latin America

seems to belong to a different world from that in which we find ourselves.

Certainly it would be absurd to claim that it should be copied here. But there are

certain parallels in the two situations which should not be overlooked. Our

advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us and subtly

programming us into conformity to the logic of its system. To the degree that this

happens, we are also be-coming submerged in a new ‘culture of silence’.

The paradox is that the same technology which does this to us also creates a new

sensitivity to what is happening. Especially among young people, the new media

together with the erosion of old concepts of authority open the way to acute

awareness of this new bondage. The young perceive that their right to say their

own word has been stolen from them, and that few things are more important than

the struggle to win it back. And they also realize that the educational system today

- from kindergarten to university - is their enemy.

There is no such thing as a neutral educational process.

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the

integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring

about conformity to it, or it becomes ‘the practice of freedom’, the means by which

men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and dis-cover how to

participate in the transformation of their world. The development of an educational

methodology that facilitates this process will inevitably lead to tension and conflict

within our society. But it could also contribute to the formation of a new man and

mark the beginning of a new era in Western history. For those who are committed

to that task and are searching for concepts and tools for experimentation, Paulo

Freire’s thought may make a significant contribution in the years ahead.

Richard Shaull

Preface

These introductory pages to Pedagogy of the Oppressed own the result of my

observations during the last six years of political exile, observations which have

enriched those previously afforded by my educational activities in Brazil.

I have encountered, both in training courses which analyse the role of

‘conscientization’ and in actual experimentation with a genuinely liberating

education, the ‘fear of freedom’ discussed in the first chapter of this book. Not

infrequently, training course participants call attention to ‘the danger of

“conscientization” in a way which reveals their own fear of freedom. Critical

consciousness, they say, is anarchic; others add that critical consciousness may

lead to disorder. But some confess: Why deny it? I was afraid of freedom. I am no

longer afraid!

In one of these discussions, the group was debating whether the conscientization

of men to a specific case of injustice might not lead them to ‘destructive

fanaticism’ or to a ‘sensation of total collapse of their world’. In the midst of the

argument a man who previously had been a factory worker for many years spoke

out: ‘Perhaps I am the only one here of working-class origin. I can’t say that I’ve

understood everything you’ve said just now, but I can say one thing - when I began

this course I was naive, and when I found out how naive I was, I started to get

critical. But this discovery hasn’t made me a fanatic, and I don’t feel any collapse

either,’

Doubt regarding the possible effects of conscientization implies a premise which

the doubter does not always make explicit: It is better for the victims of injustice

not to recognize themselves as such. In fact, conscientization does not lead men to

‘destructive fanaticism’. On the contrary, by making it possible for men to enter

the historical process as responsible subjects, conscientization enrols them in the

search for self-affirmation, thus avoiding fanaticism.

The awakening of critical consciousness leads the way- to the expres-sion of

social discontents precisely because these discontents are real components of an

oppressive situation.

Fear of freedom, of which its possessor is not necessarily aware, makes him see

ghosts. Such an individual is actually taking refuge in an attempt to achieve

security, which he prefers to the risks of liberty. As Hegel testifies in The

Phenomenology of Mind:

It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained;... the individual who has not

staked his life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he has not attained

the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.

Men rarely admit their fear of freedom openly, however, tend-ing rather to

camouflage it - sometimes unconsciously - by presenting themselves as defenders

of freedom. They give their doubts and misgivings an air of profound sobriety, as

befitting custodians of freedom. But they confuse freedom with the maintenance of

the status quo; so that if conscientization threatens to place that status quo in

question, it thereby seems to constitute a threat to freedom itself.

Thought and study alone did not produce Pedagogy of the Oppressed; it is

rooted in concrete situations and describes the reactions of workers (peasant or

urban) and of the members of the middle-class whom I have observed directly or

indirectly during the course of my educative work. Continued observation will give

me an opportunity to modify or to corroborate in later studies the points put

forward in this introductory work.

This volume will probably arouse negative reactions in a number of readers.

Some will regard my position vis-à-vis the problem of human liberation as purely

idealistic, or may even consider discussion of ontological vocation, love, dialogue,

hope, humility, and sympathy as so much reactionary ‘blah’. Others will not (or

will not wish to) accept my denunciation of a state of oppression which gratifies

the oppressors. Accordingly, this admittedly tentative work is for radicals. I am

certain that Christians and Marxists, though they may disagree with me in part or

in whole, will continue reading to the end. But the reader who dogmatically

assumes closed ‘irrational’ positions will reject the dialogue I hope this book will

open.

Sectarianism, fed by fanaticism, is always castrating. Radicalization, nourished

by a critical spirit, is always creative. Sec-tarianism makes myths and thereby

alienates; radicalization is critical and thereby liberates. Radicalization involves

in-creased commitment to the position one has chosen, and thus ever greater

engagement in the effort to transform concrete, objective reality. Conversely,

sectarianism, because it is myth-making and irrational, turns reality into a false

(and therefore unchangeable) ‘reality’.

Sectarianism in any quarter is an obstacle to the emancipa-tion of mankind. The

Rightist version thereof does not always, unfortunately, call forth its natural

counterpart: radicalization of the revolutionary. Not infrequently, revolutionaries

them-selves become reactionary by falling into sectarianism in the process of

responding to the sectarianism of the Right. This possibility, however, should not

lead the radical to become a docile pawn of the elites. Engaged in the process of

liberation, he cannot remain passive in the face of the oppressor’s violence.

On the other hand, the radical is never a subjectivist. For him the subjective

aspect exists only in relation to the objective aspect (the concrete reality which is

the object of his analysis). Subjectivity and objectivity thus join in a dialectical

unity producing knowledge in solidarity with action, and vice versa.

For his part, the sectarian of whatever persuasion, blinded by his irrationality,

does not (or cannot) perceive the dynamic of reality - or else he misinterprets it.

Should he think dialectic-ally, it is with a ‘domesticated dialectic’. The Rightist

sectarian whom I have earlier, in Educayao como Pratica da Liberdade, termed a

‘born sectarian’) wants to slow down the historical process, to ‘domesticate’ time

and thus to domesticate men. The Leftist-turned-sectarian goes totally astray when

he attempts to interpret reality and history dialectically, and falls into essentially

fatalistic positions.

The Rightist sectarian differs from his Leftist counterpart in that the former

attempts to domesticate the present so that (he hopes) the future will reproduce this

domesticated present, while the latter considers the future pre-established - a kind

of inevitable fate, fortune, or destiny. For the Rightist sectarian, ‘today’, linked to

the past, is something given and immutable; for the Leftist sectarian, ‘tomorrow’ is

decreed beforehand, is inexorably pre-ordained. This Rightist and this Leftist are

both reactionary because, starting from their respective false views of history, both

develop forms of action which negate freedom. The fact that one man imagines a

‘well-behaved’ present and the other a predetermined future does not mean that

they therefore fold their arms and become spectators (the former expecting that the

present will continue, the latter waiting for the already ‘known’ future to come to

pass). On the contrary, closing themselves into ‘circles of certainty’ from which

they cannot escape, these men ‘make’ their own truth. It is not the truth of men

who struggle to build the future, running the risks involved in this very

construction. Nor is it the truth of men who fight side by side and learn together

how to build this future - which is not something given to be received by men, but

is rather something to be created by them. Both types of sectarian, treating history

in an equally proprietary fashion end up without the people - which are another

way of being against them.

While the Rightist sectarian, closing himself in ‘ his’ truth, does no more than

fulfil his natural role, the Leftist who becomes sectarian and rigid negates his very

nature. Each, however, as he revolves about ‘his’ truth, feels threatened if that truth

is questioned. Thus, each considers anything that is not ‘his’ truth a He. As the

journalist Marcio Moreira Alves once told me: “They both suffer from an absence

of doubt.’

The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a

‘circle of certainty’ within which he also imprisons reality. On the contrary, the

more radical he is, the more fully he enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he

can better transform it. He is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world

unveiled. He is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them.

He does not consider himself the proprietor of history or of men, or the liberator of

the oppressed; but he does commit himself, within history, to fight at their side.

The pedagogy of the oppressed, the introductory outlines of which are presented

in the following pages, is a task for radicals; it cannot be carried out by sectarians.

I will be satisfied if among the readers of this work there are those sufficiently

critical to correct mistakes and mis-understandings, to deepen affirmations and to

point out aspects I have not perceived. It is possible that some may question my

right to discuss revolutionary cultural action, a subject of which I have no concrete

experience. However, the fact that I have not personally participated in

revolutionary action does not disqualify me from reflecting on this theme.

Furthermore, in my experience as an educator with the people, using a dialogical

and problem-posing education, I have accumulated a comparative wealth of

material which challenged me to run the risk of making the affirmations contained

in this work.

From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the

people, and my faith in men and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier

to love.

Here I would like to express my gratitude to Elza, my wife and ‘first reader’, for

the understanding and encouragement she has shown my work, which belongs to

her as well. I would also like to extend my thanks to a group of friends for their

comments on my manuscript. At the risk of omitting some names, I must mention

Joao da Veiga Coutinho, Richard Shaull, Jim Lamb, Myra and Jovelino Ramos,

Paulo de Tarso, Almino Affonso, Plinio Sampaio, Ernani Maria FJori, Marcela

Gajardo, Jos6 Luis Fiori, and Joao Zacarioti. The responsibility for the affirmations

made herein is, of course, mine alone.

Chapter 1

While the problem of humanization has always been, from an axiological point

of view, man’s central problem, it now takes on the character of an inescapable

concern. Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of

dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality.

And as man perceives the extent of dehumanization, he asks himself if

humanization is a viable possibility. Within history, in concrete, objective contexts,

both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for man as an uncompleted

being conscious of his incompleteness.

But while both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives, only the

first is man’s vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by

that very negation. It is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the

violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for

freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity.

Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity, has been stolen,

but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the

vocation of becoming more fully human. This distortion occurs within history; but

it is not an historical vocation. Indeed, to accept dehumanization as an historical

vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for

humanization, for the emancipation of labour, for the overcoming of aliena-tion,

for the affirmation of men as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is

possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a

given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the

oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.

Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less

human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order

for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must hot, in seeking to regain their

humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppres-sors of the

oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.

This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to

liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress,

exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to

liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the

weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to

‘soften’ the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed

almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt

never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their

‘generosity’, the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social

order is the permanent fount of this ‘generosity’, which is nourished by death,

despair, and poverty. That is why its dispensers become desperate at the slightest

threat to the source of that false generosity.

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which

nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the ‘rejects

of life’, to extend their trembling hands. Real generosity lies in striving so that

those hands - whether of individuals or entire peoples - need be extended less and

less in supplication, so that more and more they become human -hands which work

and, by working, transform the world.

This lesson and apprenticeship must come, however, from the oppressed

themselves and from those who are truly with them. By fighting for the restoration

of their humanity, as individuals or as peoples, they will be attempting the

restoration of true generosity. Who are better prepared than the oppressed to

understand the terrible significance of an oppressive society? Who suffer the

effects of oppression more than the oppressed? Who can better understand the

necessity of liberation? It will not be defined by chance but through the praxis of

their quest for it, through recognizing the necessity to fight for it. And this fight,

because of the purpose given it by the oppressed, will actually constitute an act of

love opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressors’ violence,

lovelessness even when clothed in false generosity.

But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead

of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or ‘sub-

oppressors’. The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the

contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped.

Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be a ‘man’ is to be an oppressor. This is

their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the

oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of

‘adherence’ to the oppressor. Under these circumstances they cannot ‘consider’

him sufficiently clearly to objectify him - to discover him ‘outside’ themselves.

This does not necessarily mean that the oppressed are not aware that they are

down-trodden. But their perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their

submersion in the reality of oppression. At this level, their perception of

themselves as opposites of the oppressor does not yet signify involvement in a

struggle to overcome the contradiction; the one pole aspires not to liberation, but to

identification with its opposite pole.

In this situation the oppressed cannot see the ‘new man’ as the man to be born

from the resolution of this contradiction in the process of oppression giving way to

liberation. For them, the new man is themselves become oppressors. Their vision

of the new man is individualistic; because of their identification with the oppressor,

they have no consciousness of themselves as persons or as members of an

oppressed class. It is not to become free men that they want agrarian reform, but in

order to acquire land and thus become landowners - or, more precisely, bosses over

other workers. It is a rare peasant who, once ‘promoted’ to overseer, does not

become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself. This

is because the context of the peasant’s situation, that is, oppression, remains

unchanged. In this example, the overseer, in order to make sure of his job, must be

as tough as the owner - and more so. This illustrates our previous assertion that

during the initial stage of their struggle the oppressed find in the oppressor their

model of ‘manhood’.

Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by

establishing the process of liberation, must confront this phenomenon. Many of the

oppressed who directly or indirectly participate in revolution intend - conditioned

by the myths of the old order - to make it their private revolution. The shadow pf

their former oppressor is still cast over them.

The ‘fear of freedom’ which afflicts the oppressed, a fear which may equally

well lead them to desire the role of oppressor or bind them to the role of oppressed,

should be examined. One of the basic elements of the relationship between

oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the

imposition of one man’s choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of

the man prescribed to into one that conforms to the prescriber’s consciousness.

Thus, the behaviour of the oppressed is a prescribed behaviour, following as it does

the guidelines of the oppressor.

The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his

guidelines are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image

and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest,

not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal

located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the

indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.

To surmount the situation of oppression, men must first critically recognize its

causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation - one

which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity. But the struggle to be more

fully human has already begun in the authentic struggle to transform the situation.

Although the situation of oppression is a dehumanized and dehumanizing totality

affecting both the oppressors and those whom they oppress, it is the latter who

must, from their stifled humanity, wage for both the struggle for a fuller humanity;

the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is

unable to lead this struggle.

However, the oppressed, who have adapted to the structure of domination in

which they are immersed, and have become resigned to it, are inhibited from

waging the struggle for freedom so long as they feel incapable of running the risks

it requires. Moreover, their struggle for freedom threatens not only the oppressor,

but also their own oppressed comrades who are fearful of still greater repression.

When they discover within themselves the yearning to be free, they perceive that

this yearning can be transformed into reality only when the same yearning is

aroused in their comrades. But while domin-ated by the fear of freedom they refuse

to appeal to, or listen to the appeals of, others, or even to the appeals of their own

conscience. They prefer gregariousness to authentic comradeship; they prefer the

security of conformity with their state of unfreedom to the creative communion

produced by freedom and even the very pursuit of freedom.

The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their

innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist

authentically. Yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. They are

at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they

have internalized. The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves

or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting him;

between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having

choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting pr having the illusion

of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being

silent, castrated in their power to create and recreate, in their power to transform

the world. This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education must

take into account.

This book will present some aspects of what the writer has termed the

‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the

oppressed (be they individuals or whole peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain

their humanity. This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of

reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary

engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy

will be made and remade.

The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic

beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they

discover themselves to be ‘hosts’ of the oppressor can they contribute to the

midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality where to

be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is

impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical

discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of

dehumanization.

Liberation is thus a child birth, and a painful one. The man who emerges is a

new man, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is superseded by

the humanization of all men. Or to put it another way, the solution of this

contradiction is born in the labour which brings this new man into the world: no

longer oppressor or oppressed, but man in the process of achieving freedom.

This solution cannot be achieved in idealistic terms. In order for the oppressed to

be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of

oppression, not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting

situation which they can transform. This perception is necessary, but not a

sufficient condition by itself for liberation; it must become the motivating force for

liberating action. Neither does the discovery by the oppressed that they exist in

dialectical relationship as antithesis to the oppressor who could not exist without

them (see Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind) in itself constitute liberation. The

oppressed can overcome the contradiction in which they are caught only when this

perception enlists them in the struggle to free themselves.

The same is true with respect to the individual oppressor as a person.

Discovering himself to be an oppressor may cause considerable anguish, but it

does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed. Rationalizing his guilt

through paternalistic treatment of the oppressed, all the while holding them fast in

a position of dependence, will not do. Solidarity requires that one enter into the

situation of those with whom one is identifying; it is a radical posture. If what

characterizes the oppressed is their subordination to the consciousness of the

master, as Hegel affirms, true solidarity with the oppressed means righting at their

side to transform the objective reality which has made them these ‘beings for

another’. The oppressor shows solidarity with the oppressed only when he stops

regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have

been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labour

- when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks

an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in

its existentiality, in its praxis. It is a farce to affirm that men are people and thus

should be free, yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality.

Since it is in a concrete situation that the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is

established, the resolution of this contradiction must be objectively verifiable.

Hence, for radicals - both for the man who discovers himself to be an oppressor

and for the oppressed - the concrete situation which begets oppression must be

transformed.

To present this radical demand for the objective trans-formation of reality, to

combat subjectivist immobility which would divert the recognition of oppression

into patient waiting for oppression to disappear by itself, is not to dismiss the role

of subjectivity in the struggle to change structures. On the contrary, one cannot

conceive of objectivity without sub-jectivity. Neither can exist without the other,

nor can they be dichotomized. The separation of objectivity from subjectivity, the

denial of the latter when analysing reality or acting upon it, is objectivism. On the

other hand, the denial of objectivity in analysis or action, resulting in a

subjectivism which leads to solipsistic positions, denies action itself by denying

objective reality. Neither objectivism nor subjectivism, nor yet psychologism is

propounded here, but rather subjectivity and objectivity in constant dialectical

relationship.

To deny the importance of subjectivity in the process of transforming the world

and history is naive and simplistic. It is to admit the impossible: a world without

men. This objectivistic position is as ingenuous as that of subjectivism, which

postulates men without a world. World and men do not exist apart from each other,

they exist in constant interaction. Marx does not espouse such a dichotomy, nor

does any other critical, realistic thinker. What Marx criticized and scientifically

destroyed was not subjectivity, but subjectivism and psychologism. Just as

objective social reality exists not by chance, but as the product of human action, so

it is not transformed by chance. If men produce social reality (which in the

‘inversion of the praxis turns back upon them and conditions them), then

transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for men.

Reality which becomes oppressive results in the contra-distinction of men as

oppressors and oppressed. The latter, whose task it is to struggle for their liberation

together with those who show true solidarity, must acquire a critical aware-ness of

oppression through the praxis of this struggle. One of the gravest obstacles to the

achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and

thereby acts to submerge men’s consciousness. Functionally, oppression is

domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn

upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon

the world in order to transform it.

Hay que hacer la opresion real todavla mas opresiva afladiendo a aquella la

conctencia de la opresion haciendo la infamia todavia mas infamante, al

pregonarla.’

Making ‘real oppression more oppressive still by adding to it the realization of

oppression’ corresponds to the dialectical relation between the subjective and the

objective. Only in this state of interdependence is an authentic praxis possible,

without which it is impossible to resolve the oppressor-oppressed contradiction. To

achieve this goal, the oppressed must confront reality critically, simultaneously

objectifying and acting upon that reality, A mere perception of reality not followed

by this critical intervention will not lead to a transformation of objective reality -

precisely because it is not a true perception. This is the case of a purely subjectivist

perception by someone who forsakes objective reality and creates a false

substitute.

A different type of false perception occurs when a change in objective reality

would threaten the individual or class interests of the perceiver. In the first

instance, there is no critical intervention in reality because that reality is fictitious:

there is none in the second instance because intervention would contradict the class

interests of the perceiver. In the latter case the tendency of the perceiver is to

behave ‘neurotically’. The fact exists; but both the fact and what may result from it

may be prejudicial to him. Thus it becomes necessary, not precisely to deny the

fact, but to see it differently. This rationalization as a defence mechanism coincides

in the end with subjectivism. A fact with its truths rationalized, though not denied,

loses its objective base. It ceases to be concrete and becomes a myth created in

defence of the class of the perceiver.

Herein lies one of the reasons for the prohibitions and the difficulties (to be

discussed at length in chapter 4) designed to dissuade the people from critical

intervention in reality. The oppressor knows full well that this intervention would

not be to his interest. What is to his interest is for the people to continue in a state

of submersion, impotent in the face of oppressive reality. Lukacs’ warning to the

revolutionary party in Lenine is relevant here:

.,. il droit, pour employer les mots de Marx, expliquer aux masses leur propre

action non seulement afin d’assurer la continuity des experiences revolutionnaires

du proletariat, mais aussi d’activer consciemment le developpement ulterieur de

ces experiences.

In asserting this need, Lukacs is unquestionably raising the issue of critical

intervention. ‘To explain to the masses their own action’ is to clarify and

illuminate that action, both in terms of its relationship to the objective facts which

promoted it, and also of its aims. The more the people unveil this challenging

reality which is to be the object of their trans-forming action, the more critically

they enter that reality. In this way they are ‘consciously activating the subsequent

development of their experiences’. There would be no human action if there were

no objective reality, no world to be the ‘not I’ of man to challenge him; just as

there would be no human action if man were not a ‘projection’, if he were not able

to transcend himself, to perceive his reality and understand it in order to transform

it.

In dialectical thought, world and action are intimately interdependent. But action

is human only when it is not merely an occupation but also a preoccupation, that is,

when it is not dichotomized from reflection. Reflection, which is essential to

action, is implicit in Lukacs’ requirement of explaining to the masses their own

action*, just as it is implicit in the purpose he attributes to this explanation: that of

‘consciously activating the subsequent development of experience’.

For us, however, the requirement is seen not in terms of explaining to, but rather

entering into a dialogue with, the people about their actions. In any event, no

reality transforms itself, and the duty which Lukacs ascribes to the revolutionary

party of ‘explaining to the masses their own action’ coincides with our affirmation

of the need for the critical intervention of the people in reality through the praxis.

The pedagogy of the oppressed, which is the pedagogy of men engaged in the fight

for their own liberation, has its roots here. And those who recognize, or begin to

recognize, themselves as oppressed must be among the developers of this

pedagogy. No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the

oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation

models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in

the struggle for their redemption. The pedagogy of the oppressed, animated by

authentic, humanist (not humanitarian) generosity, presents itself as a pedagogy of

man. Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interests of the oppressors (an

egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes of the oppressed

the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and embodies oppression. It is

an instrument of dehumanization. This is why, as we affirmed earlier, the

pedagogy of the oppressed cannot be developed or practised by the oppressors. It

would be a contradiction in terms if the oppressors not only defended but actually

implemented a liberating education.

But if the implementation of a liberating education requires political power and

the oppressed have none, how then is it possible to carry out the pedagogy of the

oppressed prior to the revolution? This is a question of the greatest importance, the

reply to which is at least tentatively outlined in chapter 4. One aspect of the reply is

to be found in the distinction between systematic education, which can only be

changed by political power, and educational projects, which should be carried out

with the oppressed in the process of organizing them.

The pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and libertarian pedagogy, has two

distinct stages. In the first, the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and

through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in

which the reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases

to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all men in the process of

permanent liberation. In both stages, it is always through action in depth that the

culture of domination is culturally confronted. In the first stage this confrontation

occurs through the change in the way the oppressed perceive the world of

oppression; in the second Stage, through the expulsion of the myths created and

developed in the old order, which like spectres haunt the new structure emerging

from the revolutionary transformation.

In its first stage the pedagogy must deal with the problem of the consciousness

of the oppressed and the oppressor, the problem of men who oppress and men who

suffer oppression. It must take into account their behaviour, their view of the

world, and their ethics. A particular problem is the duality of the op-pressed: they

are contradictory, divided beings, shaped by and existing in a concrete situation of

oppression and violence.

Any situation in which A objectively exploits B or hinders his pursuit of self-

affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself

constitutes violence, even when sweetened by false generosity, because it

interferes with man’s ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human.

With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun.

Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be

the initiators, if they themselves are the product of violence? How could they be

the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence

as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of

violence to establish their subjugation.

Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize

others as people - not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized. It

is not the unloved who cause disaffection, but those who cannot love because they

love only themselves. It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but

the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the

‘rejects of life’. It is not the tyrannized who are the source of despotism, but the

tyrants; nor the despised who initiate hatred, but those who despise. It is not those

whose humanity is denied them who negate man, but those who denied that

humanity (thus negating their own as well). Force is used not by those who have

become weak under the preponderance of the strong, but by the strong who have

emasculated them.

For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed (whom they obviously

never call’ the oppressed’ but - depend-ing on whether they are fellow countrymen

or not - ‘those people’ or ‘the blind and envious masses’ or ‘savages’ or ‘natives’

or ‘subversives’) who are disaffected, who are ‘violent’, ‘ barbaric’, ‘wicked’, or

‘ferocious’ when they react to the violence of the oppressors.

Yet it is - paradoxical though it may seem - precisely in the response of the

oppressed to the violence of their oppressors that a gesture of love may be found.

Consciously or un-consciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which

is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can

initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from

being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the

desire to pursue the right to be human, As the oppressors dehumanize others and

violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed,

fighting to be human, take away the oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress,

they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of

oppression.

It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.

The latter, as an oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves. It is

therefore essential that the oppressed wage the struggle to resolve the contradiction

in which they are caught. That contradiction will be resolved by the appearance of

the new man who is neither oppressor nor oppressed - man in the process of

liberation. If the goal of the oppressed is to become fully human, they will not

achieve their goal by merely reversing the terms of the contradiction, by simply

changing poles.

This may seem simplistic: it is not. Resolution of the oppressor-oppressed

contradiction indeed implies the disappearance of the oppressors as a dominant

class. However, the restraints imposed by the former oppressed on their

oppressors, so that the latter cannot reassume their former position, do not

constitute oppression. An act is oppressive only when it prevents men from being

more fully human. Accordingly, these necessary restraints do not in themselves

signify that yesterday’s oppressed have become today’s oppressors. Behaviour

which prevents the restoration of the oppressive regime cannot be compared with

acts which create and maintain it. One cannot compare it with acts by which few

men deny the majority their right to be human.

However, the moment the new regime hardens into a domin-ating ‘bureaucracy’

the humanist dimension of the struggle is lost and it is no longer possible to speak

of liberation. Hence our insistence that the authentic solution of the oppressor -

oppressed contradiction does not lie in a mere reversal of position, in moving from

one pole to the other. Nor does it lie in the replacement of the former oppressors

with new ones who continue to subjugate the oppressed - all in the name of their

liberation.

But even when contradiction is resolved authentically by a new situation

established by liberated workers, the former oppressors do not feel liberated. On

the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. Condi-tioned by

the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to

them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated,

travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes,

neither studied nor travelled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on

this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former

oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights - although they had no

respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair.

For the oppressors, ‘human beings’ refers only to themselves; other people are

‘things’. For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace,

over against the right, not always even recognized, but merely conceded, of the

oppressed to survival. And they make this concession only because the existence of

the oppressed is necessary to their own existence.

This behaviour and way of understanding the world and men (which necessarily

makes the oppressors resist the installation of a new regime) is explained by their

experience as a dominant class. Once a situation of violence and oppression has

been established, it engenders an entire way of life and behaviour for those caught

up in it - oppressors and oppressed alike. Both are submerged in this situation, and

both bear the marks of oppression. Analysis of existential situations of oppression

reveals that their inception lay in an act of violence - initiated by those with power.

This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of

oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped in its climate. This climate creates

in the oppressor a strongly possessive consciousness - possessive of the world and

of men. Apart from direct, concrete, material possession of the world and of men,

the oppressor consciousness could not understand itself - could not even exist.

Fromm said of this consciousness that, without such possession, ‘it would lose

contact with the world’. The oppressor con-sciousness tends to transform

everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property,

production, the creations of men, men themselves, time - everything is reduced to

the status of objects at its disposal.

In their unrestrained eagerness to possess, the oppressors develop the conviction

that it is possible for them to transform everything into objects of their purchasing

power; hence their strictly materialistic concept of existence. Money is the measure

of all things, and profit the primary goal. For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is

to have more - always more - even at the cost of the oppressed having less or

having nothing. For them, to be is to have and to be of the ‘having’ class.

As beneficiaries of a situation of oppression, the oppressors cannot perceive that

if having is a condition of being, it is a necessary condition for all men. This is why

their generosity is false. Humanity is a ‘thing’, and they possess it as an exclusive

right, as inherited property. To the oppressor consciousness, the humanization of

the ‘others’, of the people, appears as subversion, not as the pursuit of full

humanity.

The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly of having more as a privilege

which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic

pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and

no longer are; they merely have. For them, having more is an inalienable right, a

right they acquired through their own ‘effort’, with their ‘courage to take risks’. If

others do not have more, it is because they are incompetent and lazy, and worst of

all is their unjustifiable ingratitude towards the ‘generous gestures’ of the dominant

class. Precisely because they are ‘ungrateful’ and ‘envious’, the oppressed are

regarded as potential enemies who must be watched.

It could not be otherwise. If the humanization of the oppressed signifies

subversion, so also does their freedom; hence the necessity for constant control.

And the more the oppressors control the oppressed, the more they change them

into apparently inanimate ‘things’. This tendency of the oppressor consciousness to

render everything and everyone it encounters inanimate, in its eagerness to possess,

unquestion-ably corresponds with a tendency to sadism. Here is Fromm in The

Heart of Man:

The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate

creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the

same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform a man into a thing,

something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute

control the living loses one essential quality of life - freedom.

Sadistic love is a perverted love - a love of death, not of life. Thus, one of the

characteristics of the oppressor consciousness and its necrophilic view of the world

is sadism. As the oppressor consciousness, in order to dominate, tries to thwart the

seeking, restless impulse, and the creative power which characterize life, it kills

life. More and more, the oppressors are using science and technology as

unquestionably powerful instruments for their purpose: the maintenance of the

oppressive order through manipulation and repression. The oppressed, as objects,

as ‘things’, have no purposes except those their oppressors pre-scribe for them.

In the light of what has been said, another issue of indubitable importance arises:

the fact that certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their

struggle for liberation, thus moving from one pole of the contradiction to the other.

Theirs is a fundamental role, and has been so throughout the history of this

struggle. It happens, however, that as they cease to be exploiters or indifferent

spectators or simply the heirs of exploitation and move to the side of the exploited,

they almost always bring with them the marks of their origin: their prejudices and

their deformations, which include a lack of con-fidence in the people’s ability to

think, to want, and to know. Accordingly, these adherents to the people’s cause

constantly run the risk of falling into a type of generosity as harmful as that of the

oppressors. The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which

must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. Our converts, on the other

hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background

they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. They talk about

the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people is the indispensable

precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by

his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand

actions in their favour without that trust.

Those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine

themselves constantly. This conversion is so radical as not to allow for ambivalent

behaviour. To affirm this commitment but to consider oneself the proprietor of

revolu-tionary wisdom - which must then be given to (or imposed on) the people -

is to retain the old ways. The man who proclaims devotion to the cause of

liberation yet is unable to enter into communion with the people, whom he

continues to regard as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived. The convert

who approaches the people but feels alarm at each step they take, each doubt they

express, and each suggestion they offer, and attempts to impose his ‘status’,

remains nostalgic towards his origins.

Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth. Those who undergo it

must take on a new form of existence; they can no longer remain as they were.

Only through comradeship with the oppressed can the converts understand their

characteristic ways of living and behaving, which in diverse moments reflect the

structure of domination. One of these characteristics is the previously mentioned

existential duality of the oppressed, who are at the same time themselves and the

oppressor whose image they have internalized. Accordingly, until they concretely

‘discover’ their oppressor and in turn their own consciousness, they nearly always

express fatalistic attitudes towards their situation.

The peasant begins to get courage to overcome his dependence when he realizes

that he is dependent. Until then, he goes along with the’ boss and says ‘What can I

do? I’m only a peasant.’

When superficially analysed, this fatalism is sometimes inter-preted as a docility

that is a trait of national character. Fatalism in the guise of docility is the fruit of an

historical and sociologi-cal situation, not an essential characteristic of a people’s

behaviour. It is almost always related to the power of destiny or fate or fortune -

inevitable forces - or to a distorted view of God. Under the sway of magic and

myth, the oppressed -especially the peasants, who are almost submerged in nature

(see Mendes’ Memento de Vivas) - see their suffering, the fruit of exploitation, as

the will of God - as if God were the creator of this ‘organized disorder’.

Submerged in reality, the oppressed cannot perceive clearly the ‘order’ which

serves the interests of the oppressors whose image they have internalized. Chafing

under the restrictions of this order, they often manifest a type of horizontal

violence, striking out at their own comrades for the pettiest reasons. Frantz Fanon,

in The Wretched of the Earth, writes:

The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been

deposited in his bones against his own people. This is the period when the niggers

beat each other up, and the police and magistrates do not know which way to turn

when faced with the astonishing waves of crime in North Africa.... While the

settler or the policeman has the right the livelong day to strike the native, to insult

him and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for his knife

at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by an-other native; for the

last resort of the native is to defend his personality vis-à-vis his brother.

It is possible that in this behaviour they are once more mani-festing their duality,

because the oppressor exists within their oppressed comrades, when they attack

those comrades they are indirectly attacking the oppressor as well.

On the other hand, at a certain point in their existential experience the oppressed

feel an irresistible attraction towards the oppressor and his way of life. Sharing his

way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration. In their alienation, the oppressed

want at any cost to resemble the oppressor, to imitate him, to follow him. This

phenomenon is especially prevalent in the middle-class oppressed, who yearn to be

equal to the ‘eminent’ men of the upper class. Albert Memmi, in an exceptional

analysis of the ‘colonized mentality’, The Colonizer and the Colonized, refers to

the contempt he felt towards the colonizer, mixed with ‘passionate’ attraction

towards him.

How could the colonizer look after his workers while periodically gunning down

a crowd of colonized? How could the colonized deny himself so cruelly yet make

such excessive demands? How could he hate the colonizers and yet admire them so

passionately? (I too felt this admiration in spite of myself.)

Self-depreciation is another characteristic of the oppressed, which derives from

their internalization of the opinion the oppressors hold of them. So often do they

hear that they are good for nothing, know nothing and are incapable of learning

anything - that they are sick, lazy, and unproductive - that in the end they become

convinced of their own unfitness. ‘The peasant feels inferior to the boss because

the boss seems to be the only one who knows things and is able to run things.’

They call themselves ignorant and say the ‘professor’ is the one who has

knowledge and to whom they should listen. The criteria of knowledge imposed

upon them are the con-ventional ones. ‘Why don’t you*, said a peasant

participating in a culture circle, ‘explain the pictures first? That way it’ll take less

time and won’t give us a headache,’

Almost never do they realize that they, too, ‘know things’ they have learned in

their relations with the world and with other men. Given the circumstances which

have produced their duality, it is only natural that they distrust themselves.

Not infrequently peasants in educational projects begin to discuss a generative

theme in a lively manner, then stop suddenly and say to the educator: ‘Excuse us,

we should keep quiet and let you talk. You are the one who knows, we don’t know

anything’. They often insist that there is no difference between them and the

animals; when they do admit a difference, it favours the animals.’ They are freer

than we are.’

It is striking, however, to observe how this self-depreciation changes with the

first changes in the situation of oppression. I heard a peasant leader say in an

asentamiento meeting, ‘They used to say we were unproductive because we were

lazy and drunkards. All lies. Now that we are respected as men, we’re going to

show everyone that we were never drunkards or lazy. We were exploited!’

As long as their ambiguity persists, the oppressed are reluctant to resist, and

totally lack confidence in themselves. They have a diffuse, magical belief in the

invulnerability and power of the oppressor. The magical force of the land-owner’s

power holds particular sway in the rural areas. A sociologist friend of mine tells of

a group of armed peasants in a Latin American country who recently took over a

latifundium. For tactical reasons, they planned to hold the landowner as a hostage.

But not one peasant had the courage to guard him; his very presence was terrifying.

It is also possible that the act of opposing the boss provoked guilt feelings. In truth,

the boss was’ inside’ them.

The oppressed must see examples of the vulnerability of the oppressor so that a

contrary conviction can begin to grow within them. Until this occurs, they will

continue disheartened, fearful, and beaten (see Debray’s Revolution in the

Revolution). As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their

condition, they fatalistically ‘accept’ their exploitation. Further, they are apt to

react in a passive and alienated manner when confronted with the necessity to

struggle for their freedom and self-affirmation. Little by little, however, they tend

to try out forms of rebellious action. In working towards liberation, one must

neither lose sight of this passivity nor overlook the moment of awakening.

Within their unauthentic view of the world and of themselves, the oppressed feel

like ‘things’ owned by the oppressor. For the latter, to be is to have, almost always

at the expense of those who have nothing. For the oppressed, at a certain point in

their existential experience, to be is not to resemble the oppressor, but to be under

him, to depend on him. Accordingly, the oppressed are emotionally dependent.

The peasant is a dependant. He can’t say what he wants. Before he discovers his

dependence, he suffers. He lets off steam at home, where he shouts at his children,

beats them and despairs. He complains about his wife and thinks everything is

dreadful. He doesn’t let off steam with the boss because he thinks the boss is a

superior being. Lots of times, the peasant gives vent to his sorrows by drinking.

This total emotional dependence can lead the oppressed to what Fromm calls

necrophilic behaviour: the destruction of life-their own or that of their oppressed

fellows.

It is only when the oppressed find the oppressor out and become involved in the

organized struggle for their liberation that they begin to believe in themselves. This

discovery cannot be purely intellectual but must involve action; nor can it be

limited to mere activism, but must include serious reflection: only then will it be a

praxis.

Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried on

with the oppressed at whatever stage their struggle for liberation has reached. The

content of that dialogue can and should vary in accordance, with historical

conditions and the level at which the oppressed perceive reality. But to substitute

monologue, slogans and communiqués for dialogue is to try to liberate the

oppressed with the instruments of domestication. Attempting to liberate the

oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat

them as objects which must be saved from a burning building; it is to lead them

into the populist pitfall and transform them into masses which can be manipulated.

At all stages of their liberation, the oppressed must see themselves as men

engaged in the ontological and historical vocation of becoming more fully human.

Reflection and action become imperative when one does not erroneously attempt to

create a dichotomy between the content of humanity and its historical forms.

The insistence that the oppressed engage in reflection on their concrete situation

is not a call to armchair revolution. On the contrary, reflection - true reflection -

leads to action. On the other hand, when the situation calls for action, that action

will constitute an authentic praxis only if its consequences become the object of

critical reflection. In this sense, the praxis is the new raison d’etre of the

oppressed; and the revolution, which inaugurates the historical moment of this

raison d’etre, is not viable apart from their concomitant conscious involvement.

Otherwise, action is pure activism.

To achieve this praxis, however, it is necessary to trust in the oppressed and in

their ability to reason. Whoever lacks this trust will fail to bring about (or will

abandon) dialogue, reflection and communication, and will fall into using slogans,

communiqué’s, monologues and instructions. Superficial conversions to the cause

of liberation carry this danger.

Political action on the side of the oppressed must be pedagogical action in the

authentic sense of the word, hence, action with the oppressed. Those who work for

liberation must not take advantage of the emotional dependence of the oppressed -

dependence that is the fruit of the concrete situation of domination which

surrounds them and which engendered their unauthentic view of the world. Using

their dependence to create still greater dependence is .an oppressor tactic.

Libertarian action must recognize this dependence as a weak point and must

attempt through reflection and action to transform it into independence. However,

not even the best-intentioned leadership can bestow independence as a gift. The

liberation of the oppressed is a liberation of men, not things. Accordingly, while no

one liberates himself by his own efforts alone, neither is he liberated by others.

Liberation, a human phenomenon, cannot be achieved by semi-humans. Any

attempt to treat men as semi-humans only dehumanizes them. When men are

already dehumanized, due to the oppression they suffer, the process of their

liberation must not employ the methods of dehumanization.

The correct method for a revolutionary leadership to employ in the task of

liberation is, therefore, not ‘libertarian propaganda’. Nor can the leadership merely

‘implant’ in the oppressed a belief in freedom, thus thinking to win their trust. The

correct method lies in dialogue. The conviction of the oppressed that they must

fight for their liberation is not a gift bestowed by the revolutionary leadership, but

the result of their own conscientization.

The revolutionary leaders must realize that their own con-viction of the need for

struggle (a crucial dimension of revolutionary wisdom) was not given to them by

anyone else - if it is authentic. This conviction cannot be packaged and sold; it is

reached, rather, by means of a totality of reflection and action. Only the leaders’

own involvement in reality, within an historical situation, led them to criticize this

situation and to wish to change it.

Likewise, the oppressed (who do not commit themselves to the struggle unless

they are convinced, and who, if they do not make such a commitment, withhold the

necessary conditions for this struggle) must reach this conviction as Subjects, not

as objects. They also must intervene critically in the situation which surrounds

them and marks them: propaganda cannot achieve this. While the conviction of the

necessity for struggle (without which the struggle is unfeasible) is indispensable to

the revolutionary leadership (indeed, it was this conviction which constituted that

leadership), it is also necessary for the oppressed. It is necessary, that is, unless one

intends to carry out the transformation for the oppressed rather than with them. It is

my belief that only the latter type of transformation is valid.

The object in presenting these considerations is to defend the eminently

pedagogical character of the revolution. The revolutionary leaders of every epoch

who have affirmed that the oppressed must accept the struggle for their liberation -

an obvious point - have also thereby implicitly recognized the pedagogical aspect

of this struggle. Many of these leaders, however (perhaps due to natural and

understandable biases against pedagogy), have ended up using the ‘educational’

methods employed by the oppressor. They deny pedagogical action in the

liberation process, but they use propaganda to convince.

It is essential for the oppressed to realize that when they accept the struggle for

humanization they also accept, from that moment, their total responsibility for the

struggle. They must realize that they are fighting not merely for freedom from

hunger, but, to quote Fromm’s The Heart of Man, for... freedom to create and to

construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be

active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine.... It is not

enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of

automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death. The oppressed,

who have been shaped by the death-affirming climate of oppression, must find

through their struggle the way to life-affirming humanization, and this does not lie

simply in having more to eat (though it does involve and cannot fail to include

having more to eat). The oppressed have been destroyed precisely because their

situation has reduced them to things. In order to regain their humanity they must

cease to be things and fight as men. This is a radical requirement. They cannot

enter the struggle as objects in order later to become men.

The struggle begins with men’s recognition that they have been destroyed.

Propaganda, management, manipulation - all arms of domination - cannot be the

instruments of their re-humanization. The only effective instrument is a

humanizing pedagogy in which the revolutionary leadership establishes a

permanent relationship of dialogue with the oppressed. In a humanizing pedagogy

the method ceases to be an instrument by which the teachers (here, the

revolutionary leadership) can manipulate the students (the oppressed), because it

expresses the consciousness of the students themselves.

The method is, in fact, the external form of consciousness manifest in acts,

which takes on the fundamental property of consciousness -its intentionality. The

essence of consciousness is being with the world and this behaviour is permanent

and unavoidable. Accordingly, con-sciousness is in essence a ‘way towards’

something apart from itself, outside itself, which surrounds it and which it

apprehends by means of its ideational capacity. Consciousness is thus by definition

a method, in the most general sense of the word.”

A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education.

Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both

Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know

it critically, but in the task of recreating that knowledge. As they attain this

knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover

themselves as its permanent re-creators. In this way, the presence of the oppressed

in the struggle for their liberation will be what it should be: not pseudo-

participation, but committed involvement.

Chapter 2

A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or

outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship

involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the

students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in

the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is

suffering from narration sickness.

The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static,

compartmentalized and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely

alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to ‘fill’ the students

with the contents of his narration - contents which are detached from reality,

dis-connected from the totality that engendered them and could give them

significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow,

alienated and alienating verbosity.

The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of

words, not their transforming power. ‘Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para

is Belem.’ The student records, memorizes and repeats these phrases without

perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of

‘capital’ in the affirmation ‘the capital of Para is Belem,’ that is, what Belem

means for Para and what Para means for Brazil.

Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize

mechanically the narrated content. Worse still, it turns them into ‘containers’, into

receptacles to be filled by the teacher. The more completely he fills the receptacles,

the better a teacher he is. The more meekly the receptacles permit them-selves to

be filled, the better students they are.

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the

depositories and the teacher is the “depositor. Instead of communicating, the

teacher issues communiqués and ‘makes deposits’ which the students patiently

receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the ‘banking’ concept of education, in which

the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing,

and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become

collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is men

themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and

knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from

the praxis, men cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through

invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful

inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who

consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know

nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the

ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry.

The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by

considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students,

alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as

justifying the teacher’s existence - but, unlike the slave, they never discover that

they educate the teacher.

The raison d’etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive

towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-

student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are

simultaneously teachers and students.

This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the

contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction

through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a

whole:

1. The teacher teaches and the students are taught.

2. The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing.

3. The teacher thinks and the students are thought about.

4. The teacher talks and the students listen - meekly.

5. The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined.

6. The teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply.

7. The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action

of the teacher.

8. The teacher chooses the programme content, and the students (who were not

consulted) adapt to it.

9. The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional

authority, which he sets ha opposition to the freedom of the students.

10. The teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere

objects.

It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as

adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits

entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would

result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more

completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend

simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited

in them.

The capacity of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative

power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who

care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors

use their ‘humanitarianism’ to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react

almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the

critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but is always

seeking out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.

Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in ‘changing the consciousness of the

oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them’ (Simone de Beauvoir in La

Pensee de Droite Aujourd’hui) for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to

that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this end, the

oppressors use the banking concept of education in conjunction with a paternalistic

social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of

‘welfare recipients’. They are treated as individual cases, as marginal men who

deviate from the general con-figuration of a ‘good, organized, and just* society.

The op-pressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society, which must

therefore adjust these ‘incompetent and lazy’ folk to its own patterns by changing

their mentality. These marginals need to be ‘integrated’, ‘incorporated’ into the

“healthy society that they have ‘forsaken’,

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not marginals, are not men living

‘outside’ society. They have always been inside - inside the structure which made

them “beings for others’. The solution is not to ‘integrate’ them into the structure

of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become ‘beings for

themselves’. Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors’

purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the

threat of student conscientization.

The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never propose to

students that they consider reality critically. It will deal instead with such vital

questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat, and insist upon the

importance of learning that, on the contrary, Roger gave green grass to the rabbit.

The ‘humanism’ of the banking approach masks the effort to turn men into

automatons - the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully

human.

Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or un-knowingly (for there are

innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are

serving only to dehumanize), fail to perceive that the deposits themselves con-tain

contradictions about reality. But, sooner or later, these contradictions may lead

formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to

domesticate reality. They may discover through existential experience that their

present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human.

They may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a

process, undergoing constant trans-formation. If men are searchers and their

ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the

contra-diction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage

themselves in the struggle for their liberation.

But the humanist, revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibility to

materialize. From the outset, his efforts must coincide with those of the students to

engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must

be imbued with a profound trust in men and their creative power. To achieve this,

he must be a partner of the students in his relations with them.

The banking concept does not admit to such a partnership -and necessarily so.

To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to exchange the role of depositor,

prescriber, domesticator, for the role of student among students would be to

undermine the power of oppression and to serve the cause of liberation.

Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between man

and the world: man is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; man

is spectator, not re-creator. In this view, man is not a conscious being (corpo

consciente); he is rather the possessor of a consciousness; an empty ‘mind’

passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside. For

example, my desk, my books, my coffee cup, all the objects before me - as bits of

the world which surrounds me - would be ‘inside’ me, exactly as I am inside my

study right now. This view makes no distinction between being accessible to

consciousness and entering con-sciousness. The distinction, however, is essential:

the objects which surround me are simply accessible to my consciousness, not

located within it. I am aware of them, but they are not inside me.

It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educator’s

role is to regulate the way the world ‘enters into’ the students. His task is to

organize a process which already happens spontaneously, to ‘fill* the students by

making deposits of information which he considers constitute true knowledge. And

since men ‘receive’ the world as passive entities, education should make them

more passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated man is the adapted

man, because he is more ‘fit’ for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is

well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquillity rests on how well

men fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.

The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant

minority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their own

purposes), the more easily the minority can continue to prescribe. The theory and

practice of banking education serve this end quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons,

reading requirements, the methods for evaluating ‘knowledge’, the distance

between the teacher and the taught, the criteria for promotion: everything in this

ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate thinking.

The bank-clerk educator does not realize that there is no true security in his

hypertrophied role, that one must seek to live with others in solidarity. One cannot

impose oneself, nor even merely co-exist with one’s students. Solidarity requires

true communication, and the concept by which such an educator is guided fears

and proscribes communication.

Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher’s

thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students’ thinking. The

teacher cannot think for his students, nor can he impose his thought on them.

Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in

ivory-tower isolation, but only in com-munication. If it is true that thought has

meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of

students to teachers becomes impossible.

Because banking education begins with a false understanding of men as objects,

it cannot promote the development of what Fromm, in The Heart of Man, calls

‘biophily;, but instead produces its opposite: ‘necrophily’.

While life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional man-ner, the

necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The

necrophilous person is driven by the desire to trans-form the organic into the

inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things....

Memory, rather than experi-ence; having, rather than being, is what counts. The

necrophilous person can relate to an object - a flower or a person - only if he

possesses it; hence a threat to his possession is a threat to himself; if he loses

possession he loses contact with the world. ... He loves control, and in the act of

controlling he kills life.

Oppression - overwhelming control - is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of

death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of

oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic,

spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It

attempts to control thinking and action, leads men to adjust to the world, and

inhibits their creative power.

When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find themselves

unable to use their faculties, men suffer. ‘This suffering due to impotence is rooted

in the very fact that the human equilibrium has been disturbed’, says Fromm. But

the inability to act which causes men’s anguish also causes them to reject their

impotence, by attempting

... to restore [their] capacity to act. But can [they], and how? One way is to

submit to and identify with a person or group having power. By this symbolic

participation in another person’s life, [men have] the illusion of acting, when in

reality [they] only submit to and become a part of those who act.

Populist manifestations perhaps best exemplify this type of behaviour by the

oppressed, who, by identifying with charis-matic leaders, come to feel that they

themselves are active and effective. The rebellion they express as they emerge in

the historical process is motivated by that desire to act effectively. The dominant

elites consider the remedy to be more domination and repression, carried out in the

name of freedom, order and social peace (the peace of the elites, that is). Thus they

can condemn - logically, from their point of view - ‘the violence of a strike by

workers and [can] call upon the state in the same breath to use violence in putting

down the strike’ (Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society).

Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students,

with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating

them to adapt to the world of oppression. This accusation is not made in the naive

hope that the dominant elites will thereby simply abandon the practice. Its

objective is to call the attention of true humanists to the fact that they cannot use

the methods of banking education in the pursuit of liberation, as they would only

negate that pursuit itself. Nor may a revolutionary society inherit these methods

from an oppressor society. The revolutionary society which practises banking

education is either misguided or mis-trustful of men. In either event, it is

threatened by the spectre of reaction.

Unfortunately, those who espouse the cause of liberation are themselves

surrounded and influenced by the climate which generates the banking concept,

and often do not perceive its true significance or its dehumanizing power.

Paradoxically, then, they utilize this very instrument of alienation in what they

consider an effort to liberate. Indeed, some ‘revolutionaries’ brand as innocents,

dreamers, or even reactionaries those who would challenge this educational

practice. But one does not liberate men by alienating them. Authentic liberation -

the process of humanization - is not another ‘deposit’ to be made in men.

Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men upon their world in order to

transform it. Those truly com-mitted to the cause of liberation can accept neither

the mechanistic concept of consciousness as an empty vessel to be filled, nor the

use of banking methods of domination (propaganda, slogans - deposits) in the

name of liberation.

The truly committed must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting

instead a concept of men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness

directed towards the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-

making and replace it with the posing of the problems of men in their re-lations

with the world. ‘Problem-posing’ education, responding to the essence of

consciousness - intentionality - rejects communiqué and embodies communication.

It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not

only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian ‘split’ -

consciousness as consciousness of conscious-ness.

Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of

information. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far from

being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors - teacher on

the one hand and students on the other. Accordingly, the practice of problem-

posing education first of all demands a resolution of the teacher-student

contradiction. Dialogical relations - indispensable to the capacity of cognitive

actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object - are otherwise

impossible.

Indeed, problem-posing education, breaking the vertical patterns characteristic

of banking education, can fulfil its function of being the practice of freedom only if

it can over-come the above contradiction. Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-

students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges:

teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-

who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in

their turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a

process in which all grow. In this process, arguments based on ‘authority’ are no

longer valid; in order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not

against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. Men teach each

other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking

education are ‘owned’ by the teacher.

The banking concept (with its tendency to dichotomize everything) distinguishes

two stages in the action of the educator. During the first, he cognizes a cognizable

object while he pre-pares his lessons in his study or his laboratory; during the

second, he expounds to his students on that object. The students are not called

upon to know, but to memorize the contents narrated by the teacher. Nor do the

students practise any act of cognition, since the object towards which that act

should be directed is the property of the teacher rather than a medium evoking the

critical reflection of both teacher and students. Hence in the name of the

‘preservation of culture and knowledge’ we have a system which achieves neither

true knowledge nor true culture.

The problem-posing method does not dichotomize the activity of the teacher-

student: he is not ‘cognitive’ at one point and ‘narrative’ at another. He is always

‘cognitive’, whether preparing a project or engaging in dialogue with the students.

He does not regard cognizable objects as his private property, but as the object of

reflection by himself and the students. In this way, the problem-posing educator

constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students -

no longer docile listeners - are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the

teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration,

and re-examines his earlier considerations as the students express their own. The

role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the

conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true

knowledge, at the level of the logos.

Whereas banking education anaesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-

posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to

maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of

con-sciousness and critical intervention in reality.

Students, as they are increasingly faced with problems re-lating to themselves in

the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to

respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to

other problems within a total context, not as a theoretical question, the resulting

comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated.

Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new

understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as

committed.

Education as the practice of freedom - as opposed to educa-tion as the practice

of domination - denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached

to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from men.

Authen-tic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without men,

but men in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and

world are simultaneous: conscious-ness neither precedes the world nor follows it.

‘La conscience et le monde sont dormes d’wi meme coup; exterieur par essence a

la conscience, le monde est, par essence relatif a elle’, writes Sartre. In one of our

culture circles in Chile, the group was discussing (based on a codification) the

anthropological con-cept of culture. In the midst of the discussion, a peasant who

by banking standards was completely ignorant said: ‘Now I see that without man

there is no world. When the educator responded: ‘Let’s say, for the sake of

argument, that all the men on earth were to die, but that the earth itself remained,

together with trees, birds, animals, rivers, seas, the stars ... wouldn’t all this be a

world?’ ‘Oh no,’ the peasant replied emphatically. ‘There would be no one to say:

“This is a world”.’

The peasant wished to express the idea that there would be lacking the

consciousness of the world which necessarily implies the world of consciousness.’

I’ cannot exist without a’ not I’. In turn, the ‘not I’ depends on that existence. The

world which brings consciousness into existence becomes the world of that

consciousness. Hence the previously cited affirmation of Sartre: ‘La conscience et

le monde sont dormes d’un meme coup.’

As men, simultaneously reflecting on themselves and on the world, increase the

scope of their perception, they begin to direct their observations towards

previously inconspicuous phenomena. Husserl writes:

In perception properly so-called, as an explicit awareness [Gewahren], I am

turned towards the object, to the paper, for instance. I appre-hend it as being this

here and now. The apprehension is a singling out, every object having a

background in experience. Around and about the paper He books, pencils, ink-well

and so forth, and these in a certain sense are also ‘perceived’, perceptually there, in

the ‘field of intuition’; but whilst I was turned towards the paper there was no

turning in their direction, nor any apprehending of them, not even in a secondary

sense. They appeared and yet were not singled out, were not posited on their own

account. Every perception of a thing has such a zone of background intuitions or

background awareness, if ‘intuiting’ already includes the state of being turned

towards, and this also is a ‘conscious experience’, or more briefly a ‘consciousness

of all indeed that in point of fact lies in the co-perceived objective background.

That which had existed objectively but had not been perceived in its deeper

implications (if indeed it was perceived at all) begins to ‘Standout’, assuming the

character of a problem and therefore of challenge. Thus, men begin to single out

elements from their ‘background awareness’s’ and to reflect upon them. These

elements are now objects of men’s consideration, and, as such, objects of their

action and cognition.

In problem-posing education, men develop their power to perceive critically the

way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they

come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in

transformation. Although the dialectical relations of men with the world exist

independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are

perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action men adopt is to a large extent

a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-

student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the

world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an

authentic form of thought and action.

Once again, the two educational concepts and practices under analysis come into

conflict. Banking education (for obvious reasons) attempts, by mythicizing reality,

to conceal certain facts which explain the way men exist in the world; problem-

posing education sets itself the task of demythologizing. Banking education resists

dialogue; problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of

cog-nition which unveils reality. Banking education treats students as objects of

assistance; problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers. Banking

education inhibits creativity and domesticates (although it cannot completely

destroy) the intentionality of consciousness by isolating consciousness from the

world, thereby denying men their ontological and historical vocation of becoming

more fully human. Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and

stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the

vocation of men as beings who are authentic only when engaged in inquiry and

creative transformation. In sum: banking theory and practice, as immobilizing and

fixating forces, fail to acknowledge men as historical beings; problem-posing

theory and practice take man’s historicity as their starting point.

Problem-posing education affirms men as beings in the process of becoming - as

unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality. Indeed,

in contrast to other animals who are unfinished, but not historical, men know

them-selves to be unfinished; they are aware of their incompleteness. In this

incompleteness and this awareness He the very roots of education as an exclusively

human manifestation. The un-finished character of men and the transformational

character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.

Education is thus constantly remade in the praxis. In order to be, it must become.

Its ‘duration’ (in the Bergsonian meaning of the word) is found in the interplay of

the opposites per-manence and change. The banking method emphasizes

per-manence and becomes reactionary; problem-posing education - which accepts

neither a ‘well-behaved’ present nor a pre-determined future - roots itself in the

dynamic present and becomes revolutionary.

Problem-posing education is revolutionary futurity. Hence it is prophetic (and,

as such, hopeful), and so corresponds to the historical nature of man. Thus, it

affirms men as beings who transcend themselves, who move forward and look

ahead, for whom immobility represents a fatal threat, for whom looking at the past

must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that

they can more wisely build the future. Hence, it identifies with the movement

which engages men as beings aware of their incompleteness - an historical

movement which has its point of departure, its subjects and its objective.

The point of departure of the movement lies in men them-selves. But since men

do not exist apart from the world, apart from reality, the movement must begin

with the men-world relationship. Accordingly, the point of departure must always

be with men in the ‘here and now’, which constitutes the situation within which

they are submerged, from which they emerge, and in which they intervene. Only

by starting from this situation - which determines their perception of it - can they

begin to move. To do this authentically they must perceive their state not as fated

and unalterable, but merely as limiting - and therefore challenging.

Whereas the banking method directly or indirectly reinforces men’s fatalistic

perception of their situation, the problem-posing method presents this very

situation to them as a problem. As the situation becomes the object of their

cognition, the naive or magical perception which produced their fatalism gives way

to perception which is able to perceive itself even as it perceives reality, and can

thus be critically objective about that reality.

A deepened consciousness of their situation leads men to apprehend that

situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation. Resignation gives

way to the drive for trans-formation and inquiry, over which men feel themselves

in control. If men, as historical beings necessarily engaged with other men in a

movement of inquiry, did not control that movement, it would be (and is) a

violation of men’s humanity. Any situation in which some men prevent others

from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not

important; to alienate men from their own decision-making is to change them into

objects.

This movement of inquiry must be directed towards humanization - man’s

historical vocation. The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in

isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity; therefore it cannot

unfold in the antagonistic relations between oppressors and oppressed. No one can

be authentically human while he prevents others from being so. The attempt to be

more human, individualistically, leads to having more, egotistically: a form of

dehumanization. Not that it is not fundamental to have in order to be human.

Precisely because it is necessary, some men’s having must not be allowed to

constitute an obstacle to others’ having, to consolidate the power of the former to

crush the latter.

Problem-posing’ education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as

fundamental that men subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation.

To that end, it enables teachers and students to become subjects of the educational

process by overcoming authoritarianism and an alienating intellectualism; it also

enables men to overcome their false perception of reality. The world - no longer

something to be described with deceptive words - becomes the object of that

transforming action by men which results in their humanization.

Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the

oppressor. No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question:

Why? While only a revolu-tionary society can carry out this education in

systematic terms, the revolutionary leaders need not take full power before they

can employ the method. In the revolutionary process, the leaders cannot utilize the

banking method as an interim measure, justified on grounds of expediency, with

the intention of later behaving in a genuinely revolutionary fashion. They must be

revolutionary - that is to say, analogical - from the outset.

Chapter 3

As we attempt to analyse dialogue as a human phenomenon, we discover

something which is the essence of dialogue itself: the word. But the word is more

than just an instrument which makes dialogue possible; accordingly, we must seek

its con-stituent elements. Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and

action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed - even in part - the other

immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis.

Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world.

An unauthentic word, one which is unable to transform reality, results when

dichotomy is imposed upon its constituent elements. When a word is deprived of

its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is

changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating ‘blah’. It

becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation

is impossible without a commit-ment to transform, and there is no transformation

without action.

On the other hand, if action is emphasized exclusively, to the detriment of

reflection, the word is converted into activism. The latter - action for action’s sake

- negates the true praxis and makes dialogue impossible. Either dichotomy, by

creating unauthentic forms of existence, also creates unauthentic forms of thought,

which reinforce the original dichotomy.

Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but

only by true words, with which men transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to

name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the

namer as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Men are not built in

silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.

But while to say the true word - which is work, which is praxis - is to transform

the world, saying that word is not the privilege of some few men, but the right of

every man. Con-sequently, no one can say a true word alone - nor can he say it for

another, in a prescriptive Set which robs others of their words.

Dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name

the world. Hence, dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the

world and those who do not want this naming - between those who deny other men

the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them.

Those who have been denied their primordial right to speak their word must first

reclaim this right and prevent the continuation of this dehumanizing aggression.

If it is in speaking their word that men transform the world by naming it,

dialogue imposes itself as the way in which men achieve significance as men.

Dialogue is thus an existential necessity. And since dialogue is the encounter in

which the united reflection and action of the dialoguers are addressed to the world

which is to be transformed and humanized, this dialogue cannot be reduced to the

act of one person’s ‘depositing’ ideas in another, nor can it become a simple

exchange of ideas to be ‘consumed’ by the participants in the discussion. Nor yet is

it a hostile, polemical argument between men who are committed neither to the

naming of the world, nor to the search for truth, but rather to the imposition of their

own truth. Because dialogue is an encounter among men who name the world, it

must not be a situation where some men name on behalf of others. It is an act of

creation; it must not serve as a crafty instrument for the domination of one man by

another. The domination implicit in dialogue is that of the world by those who

enter into dialogue, it is the conquest of the world for the liberation of men.

Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world

and for men. The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and re-creation,

is not possible if it is not infused with love. Love is at the same time the foundation

of dialogue and dialogue itself. It is thus necessarily the task of responsible

Subjects and cannot exist in a relation of domination. Domination reveals the

pathology of love: sadism in the dominator and masochism in the dominated.

Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to other men.

No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their

cause - the cause of liberation. And this commitment, because it is loving, is

dialogical. As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom,

it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of

freedom; otherwise, it is not love. Only by abolish-ing the situation of oppression

is it possible to restore the love which that situation made impossible. If I do not

love the world - if I do not love life - if I do not love men - I cannot enter into

dialogue.

On the other hand, dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the

world, through which men constantly re-create that world, cannot be an act of

arrogance. Dialogue, as the encounter of men addressed to the common task of

learning and acting, is broken if the parties (or one of them) lack humility. How

can I enter into a dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never

perceive my own? How can I enter into dialogue if I regard myself as a case apart

from other men - mere ‘its’ in whom I cannot recognize other ‘Is’? How can I enter

into dialogue if I consider myself a member of the in-group of pure men, the

owners of truth and knowledge, for whom all non-members are ‘these people’ or

‘the great un-washed’? If I start from the premise that naming the world is the task

of an elite and that the presence of the people in history is a sign of deterioration

which is to be avoided, how can I hold a dialogue? Or if I am closed to - and even

offended by - the contribution of others; if I am tormented and weakened by the

possibility of being displaced, how can there be dialogue? Self-sufficiency is

incompatible with dialogue. Men who lack humility (or have lost it) cannot come

to the people, cannot be their partners in naming the world. Someone who cannot

ack-nowledge himself to be as mortal as everyone else still has a long way to go

before he can reach the point of encounter. At the point of encounter there are

neither utter ignoramuses nor perfect sages; there are only men who are attempting,

together, to learn more than they now know.

Dialogue further requires an intense faith in man, faith in his power to make and

remake, to create and re-create, faith in his vocation to be more fully human

(which is not the privilege of an elite, but the birthright of all men). Faith in man is

an a priori requirement for dialogue; the ‘dialogical man’ believes in other” men

even before he meets them face to face. His faith, however, is not naive. The’

dialogical man’ is critical and knows that although it is within the power of men to

create and trans-form in a concrete situation of alienation men may be impaired in

the use of that power. Far from destroying his faith in man, however, this

possibility strikes him as a challenge to which he must respond. He is convinced

that the power to create and transform, even when thwarted in concrete situations,

tends to be reborn. And that rebirth can occur - not gratuitously, but in and through

the struggle for liberation -in slave labour being superseded by emancipated labour

which gives zest to life. Without this faith in man, dialogue is a farce which

inevitably degenerates into paternalistic manipulation.

Founding itself upon love, humility and faith, dialogue be-comes a horizontal

relationship of which mutual trust between the participants is the logical

consequence. It would be a contradiction in terms if dialogue - loving, humble and

full of faith - did not produce a climate of mutual trust, which leads the people

involved into ever closer partnership in the naming of the world. Conversely, such

trust is obviously absent in the anti-dialogics of the banking method of education.

Whereas faith in man is an a priori requirement for dialogue, trust is established by

dialogue. Should it fail, it will be seen that the preconditions were lacking. False

love, false humility and feeble faith in man cannot create trust. Trust is contingent

on the evidence which one party provides the others of his true, concrete

intentions; it cannot exist if that party’s words do not coincide with his actions. To

say one thing and do another - to take one’s own word lightly - cannot inspire trust.

To glorify democracy and to silence the people is a farce; to discourse on

humanism and to negate man is a lie.

Nor yet can dialogue exist without hope. Hope is rooted in men’s

incompleteness, from which they move out in constant search - a search which can

be carried out only in communion with other men. Hopelessness is a form of

silence, of denying the world and fleeing from it. The dehumanization resulting

from an unjust order is not a cause for despair but for hope, leading to the incessant

pursuit of the humanity which is denied by injustice. Hope, however, does not

consist in folding one’s arms and waiting. As long as I fight, I am moved by hope;

and if I fight with hope, then I can wait. As the encounter of men seeking to be

more fully human, dialogue cannot be carried on in a climate of hopelessness. If

the participants expect nothing to come of their efforts, their encounter will be

empty and sterile, bureaucratic and tedious.

Finally, true dialogue cannot exist unless it involves critical thinking - thinking

which discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and men admitting of no

dichotomy between them - thinking which perceives reality as process and

trans-formation, rather than as a static entity - thinking which does not separate

itself from action, but constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the

risks involved. Critical thinking contrasts with naive thinking, which sees

‘historical time as a weight, a stratification of the acquisitions and experiences of

the past’, from which the present should emerge normalized and ‘well-behaved’.

For the naive thinker, the important thing is accommodation to this normalized

‘today’. For the critic, the important thing is the continuing transformation of

reality, for the sake of the continuing humanization of men. In the words of Pierre

Furter:

The goal will no longer be to eliminate the risks of temporality by clutching to

guaranteed space, but rather to temporalize space.... The universe is revealed to me

not as space, imposing a massive presence to which I can only adapt, but as a

scope, a domain which takes shape as I act upon it.

For naive thinking, the goal is precisely to hold fast to this guaranteed space and

adjust to it. By thus denying temporality, it denies itself as well.

Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is also capable of generating

critical thinking. Without dialogue there is no communication, and without

communication there can be no true education. Education which is able to resolve

the con-tradiction between teacher and student takes place in a situation in which

both address their act of cognition to the object by which they are mediated. Thus,

the dialogical character of education as the practice of freedom does not begin

when the teacher-student meets the students-teachers in a pedagogical situation,

but rather when the former first asks him what his dialogue with the latter will be

about. And preoccupation with the content of dialogue is really preoccupation with

the programme content of education.

For the anti-dialogical banking educator, the question of content simply

concerns the programme about which he will discourse to his students; and he

answers his own question, by organizing his own programme. For the dialogical,

problem-posing teacher-student, the programme content of education is neither a

gift nor an imposition - bits of information to be deposited in the students - but

rather the organized, systematized, and developed ‘representation’ to individuals of

the things about which they want to know more.

Authentic education is not carried on by A for B or by A about B, but rather by

A with B, mediated by the world - a world which impresses and challenges both

parties, giving rise to views or opinions about it. These views, impregnated with

anxieties, doubts, hopes, or hopelessness, imply significant themes on the basis of

which the programme content of education can be built. In its desire to create an

ideal model of the ‘good man’, a naively conceived humanism often overlooks the

concrete, existential, present situation of real men. Authentic humanism, in Pierre

Furter’s words, ‘consists in permitting the emergence of the awareness of our full

humanity, as a condition and as an obligation, as a situation and as a project’. We

simply cannot go to the workers - urban or peasant - in the banking style, to give

them ‘knowledge’ or to impose upon them the model of the ‘good man’ contained

in a programme whose content we have ourselves organized. Many political and

edu-cational plans have failed because their authors designed them according to

their own personal views of reality, never once taking into account (except as mere

objects of their action) the men-in-a-situation towards whom their programme was

ostensibly directed.

For the truly humanist educator and the authentic revolu-tionary, the object of

action is the reality to be transformed by them together with other men - not other

men themselves. The oppressors are the ones who act upon men to indoctrinate

them and adjust them to a reality, which must remain untouched. Unfortunately,

however, in their desire to obtain the support of the people for revolutionary action,

revolutionary leaders often fall for the banking line of planning a programme

content from the top down. They approach the peasant or urban masses with

projects which may correspond to their own view of the world, but not to that of

the people. They forget that their fundamental objective is to fight alongside the

people for the recovery of the people’s stolen humanity, not to ‘win the people

over’ to their side. Such a phrase does not belong in the vocabulary of

revolutionary leaders, but in that of the oppressor. The revolutionary’s role is to

liberate, and be liberated, with the people - not to win them over.

In their political activity, the dominant elites utilize the banking concept to

encourage passivity in the oppressed, corresponding with the latter’s ‘submerged’

state of consciousness and take advantage of that passivity to ‘fill’ that

consciousness with slogans which create even more fear of freedom. This practice

is incompatible with a truly liberating course of action which, by presenting the

oppressors’ slogans as a problem, helps the oppressed to ‘eject’ those slogans from

within them-selves. After all, the task of the humanists is surely not that of pitting

their slogans against the slogans of the oppressors, with the oppressed as the

testing ground, ‘housing’ the slogans of first one group and then the other. On the

contrary, the task of the humanists is to see that the oppressed become aware of the

fact that as dual beings, ‘housing’ the oppressors within themselves, they cannot be

truly human.

This task implies that revolutionary leaders do not go to the people in order to

bring them a message of *salvation’, but in order to come to know through

dialogue with them both their objective situation and their awareness of that

situation - the various levels of perception of themselves and of the world in which

and with which they exist. One cannot expect positive results from an educational

or political action programme which fails to respect the particular view of the

world held by the people. Such a programme constitutes cultural invasion, good

intentions notwithstanding.

The starting point for organizing the programme content of education or

political action must be the present, existential, concrete situation, reflecting the

aspirations of the people. Utilizing certain basic contradictions, we must pose this

exis-tential, concrete, present situation to the people as a problem which challenges

them and requires a response - not just at the intellectual level, but at the level of

action.

We must never merely discourse on the present situation, must never provide the

people with programmes which have little or nothing to do with their own

preoccupations, doubts, hopes, and fears - programmes which at times in fact

increase the fears of the oppressed consciousness. It is not our role to speak to the

people about our own view of the world, nor to attempt to impose that view on

them, but rather to dialogue with the people about their view and ours. We must

realize that their view of the world, manifested variously in their action, reflects

their situation in the world. Educational and political action which is not critically

aware of this situation runs the risk either of ‘banking’ or of preaching in the

desert. Often, educators and politicians speak and are not understood because their

language is not attuned to the concrete situation of the men they address.

Accordingly, their talk is just alienated and alienating rhetoric. The language of the

educator or the politician (and it seems more and more clear that the latter must

also become an educator, in the broadest sense of the word), like the language of

the people, cannot exist without thought; and neither language nor thought can

exist without a structure to which they refer. In order to communicate effectively,

educator and politician must understand the structural conditions in which the

thought and language of the people are dialectically framed.

It is to the reality which mediates men, and to the perception of that reality held

by educators and people, that we must go to find the programme content of

education. The investigation of what I have termed the people’s ‘thematic

universe’- the complex of their ‘generative themes’ -inaugurates the dialogue of

education as the practice of freedom. The methodology of that investigation must

likewise be dialogical, providing the opportunity both to discover generative

themes and to stimulate people’s awareness in regard to these themes. Consistent

with the liberating purpose of dialogical education, the object of the investigation

is not men (as if men were anatomical fragments), but rather the thought-language,

men use to refer to reality, the levels at which they perceive that reality, and their

view of the world, which is the source of their generative themes.

Before describing a ‘generative theme’ more precisely (which will also clarify

what is meant by a ‘minimum thematic universe’) it seems to me essential to

present a few preliminary reflections. The concept of a generative theme is neither

an arbitrary invention nor a working hypothesis that has to be proved. If it were a

hypothesis to be proved, the initial investi-gation would seek not to ascertain the

nature of the theme, but rather the very existence or non-existence of themes

them-selves. In that event, before attempting to understand the theme in its

richness, its significance, its plurality, its trans-formations (see my Cultural Action

for Freedom), and its historical composition, we would first have to verify whether

or not it is an objective fact; only then could we proceed to apprehend it. Although

an attitude of critical doubt is legitim-ate, it does appear possible to verify the

reality of the generative theme - not only through one’s own existential experience,

but also through critical consideration of the men-world relation-ship and the

relationships between men implicit in the former. This point deserves more

attention. One may well remember - trite as it seems - that, of the uncompleted

beings, man is the only one to treat not only his actions but his very self as the

object of his reflection; this capacity distinguishes him from the animals, which are

unable to separate themselves from their activity and thus are unable to reflect

upon it. In this appar-ently superficial distinction lie the boundaries which delimit

the action of each in his life space. Because the animals’ activity is an extension of

themselves, the results- of that activity are also inseparable from themselves:

animals can neither set objectives not infuse their transformation of nature with

any significance beyond itself. Moreover, the ‘decision’ to perform this activity

belongs not to them but to their species. Animals are, accord-ingly, fundamentally

“beings in themselves’.

Unable to decide for themselves, unable to objectify either themselves or their

activity, lacking objectives which they them-selves have set, living ‘submerged’ in

a world to which they can give no meaning, lacking a ‘tomorrow’ and a ‘today’

because they exist in an overwhelming present, animals are ahistorical. Their

ahistorical life does not occur in the ‘world’, taken in its strict meaning; for the

animal, the world does not constitute a ‘not-I’ which could set him apart as an ‘I’.

The human world, which is historical, serves as a mere prop for the ‘being in itself.

Animals are not challenged by the configura-tion which confronts them; they are

merely stimulated. Their life is not one of risk-taking, for they are not aware of

taking risks. Risks are not challenges perceived upon reflection, but merely ‘noted’

by the signs which indicate them; they accordingly do not require decision-making

responses.

Consequently, animals cannot commit themselves. Their historical condition

does not permit them to ‘take on’ life. Because they do not ‘take it on’, they cannot

construct it; and if they do not construct it, they cannot transform its

configura-tion. Nor can they know themselves to be destroyed by life, ‘for they

cannot expand their ‘prop’ world into a meaningful, symbolic world which

includes culture and history. As a result, animals do not ‘animalize’ their

configuration in order to animalize themselves - nor do they ‘de-animalize’

themselves. Even in the forest, they remain ‘beings-in-themselves’, as animal-like

there as in the zoo.

In contrast, men are aware of their activity and the world in which they are

situated. They act in function of the objectives which they propose, have the seat of

their decisions located in themselves and in their relations with the world and with

others, and infuse the world with their creative presence by means of the

transformation they effect upon it. Unlike animals, they not only live but exist; and

their existence is historical. Animals live out their lives on an a temporal, flat,

uniform ‘prop’; men exist in a world which they are constantly recreating and

transforming. For animals, ‘here’ is only a habitat with which they enter into

contact; for men, “here” signifies not merely a physical space, but also an historical

space.

Strictly speaking, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘there’, ‘tomorrow’, and ‘yesterday’ do not

exist for the animal, whose life, lacking self-consciousness, is totally determined.

Animals cannot surmount the limits imposed by the ‘here’, the ‘now’, or the

‘there’.

Men, however, because they are aware of themselves and thus of the world -

because they are conscious beings - exist in a dialectical relationship between the

determination of limits and their own freedom. As they separate themselves from

the world, which they objectify, as they separate themselves from their own

activity, as they locate the seat of their decisions in themselves and in their

relations with the world and others, men overcome the situations which limit them:

the ‘limit-situations’. Once perceived by men as fetters, as obstacles to their

liberation, these situations stand out in relief from the background, revealing their

true nature as concrete historical dimensions of a given reality. Men respond to the

challenge with actions which Vieira Pinto calls ‘limit-acts’: those directed at

negating and overcoming, rather than passively accepting, the ‘given’.

Thus, it is not the limit-situations in and of themselves which create a climate of

hopelessness, but rather how they are perceived by men at a given historical

moment: whether they appear as fetters or as insurmountable barriers. As critical

perception is embodied in action, a climate of hope and con-fidence develops

which leads men to attempt to overcome the limit-situations. This objective can be

achieved only through action upon the concrete, historical reality in which limit-

situations historically are found. As reality is transformed and these situations are

superseded, new ones will appear, which in turn will evoke new limit-acts.

The prop world of animals contains no limit-situations, due to its ahistorical

character. Similarly, animals lack the ability to exercise limit-acts, which require a

decisive attitude towards the world: separation from and objectification of the

world in order to transform it. Organically bound to their prop, animals do not

distinguish between themselves and the world. Accordingly, animals are not

limited by limit-situations - which are historical - but rather by the entire prop. And

the appropriate rote for animals is not to relate to their prop (in that event, the prop

would be a world), but to adapt to it. Thus, when animals ‘produce’ a nest, a hive,

or a burrow, they are not creating products which result from ‘limit-acts’, that is,

transforming responses. Their productive activity is subordinated to the satisfaction

of a physical necessity which is simply stimulating, rather than challenging. ‘An

animal’s product belongs immedi-ately to its physical body, whilst man freely

confronts his product,’ says Marx in Dirk Struik’s edition of his 1844 manuscripts.

Only products which result from the activity of a being but do not belong to its

physical body (though these products may bear its seal), can give a dimension of

meaning to the context, which thus becomes a world. A being capable of such

production (who thereby is necessarily aware of himself, is a ‘ being for himself)

could no longer be if he were not in the process of being in the world with which

he relates; just as the world would no longer exist if this being did not exist.

The difference between animals - who (because their activity does not constitute

limit-acts) cannot create products detached from themselves - and men - who

through their action upon the world create the realm of culture and history - is that

only the latter are beings of the praxis. Only men are praxis - the praxis which, as

the reflection and action which truly transform reality’ is the source of knowledge

and creation. Animal activity, which occurs without a praxis, is not creative; man’s

transforming activity is.

It is as transforming and creative beings that men, in their permanent relations

with reality, produce not only material goods - tangible objects - but also social

institutions, ideas, and concepts. Through their continuing praxis, men

simultan-eously create history and become historical-social beings. Because - in

contrast to animals - men can tri-dimensionalize time into the past, the present, and

the future, their history, in function of their own creations, develops as a constant

process of transformation within which epochal units materialize. These epochal

units are not closed periods of time, static com-partments within which men are

confined. Were this the case, a fundamental condition of history - its continuity -

would dis-appear. On the, contrary, epochal units interrelate in the dyn-amics of

historical continuity.

An epoch is characterized by a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts,

values, and challenges in dialectical interaction with their opposites, striving

towards fulfilment. The concrete representation of many of these ideas, values,

concepts and hopes, as well as the obstacles which impede man’s full

humanization, constitute the themes of that epoch. These themes imply others

which are opposing or even antithetical; they also indi-cate tasks to be carried out

and fulfilled. Thus, historical themes are never isolated, independent, disconnected,

or static; they are always interacting dialectically with their opposites.

Nor can these themes be found anywhere except in the men-world relationship.

The complex of interacting themes of an epoch constitutes its ‘thematic universe’.

Confronted by this ‘universe of themes’ in dialectical contradiction, men take

equally contradictory positions: some work to maintain the structures, others to

change them. As antagonism deepens between themes which are the expression pf

reality, there is a tendency for the themes and for reality itself to be mythicized,

establishing a climate of irrationality and sectarianism. This climate threatens to

drain the themes of their deeper significance and to deprive them of their

characteristically dynamic aspect. In such a situation, myth-creating irration-ality

itself becomes a fundamental theme. Its opposing theme, the critical and dynamic

view of the world, strives to unveil reality, unmask its mythicization, and achieve a

full realization of the human task: the permanent transformation of reality in favour

of the liberation of men.

In the last analysis, the themes both contain and are contained in limit-situations;

the tasks they imply require limit-acts. When the themes are concealed by the

limit-situations and thus are not clearly perceived, the corresponding tasks – mens’

responses in the form of historical action - can be neither authentically nor

critically fulfilled. In this situation, men are unable to transcend the limit-situations

to discover that there lies beyond these situations - and in contradiction to them -an

untested feasibility.

In brief, limit-situations imply the existence both of persons who are directly or

indirectly served by these situations, and of those who are negated and curbed by

them. Once the latter come to perceive these situations as the frontier between

being and being more human, rather than between being and nothing-ness, they

begin to direct their increasingly critical actions towards achieving the untested

feasibility implicit in that perception. On the other hand, those who are served by

the present limit-situation regard the untested feasibility as a threatening limit-

situation which must not be allowed to materialize, and act to maintain the status

quo. Consequently, liberating actions in an historical milieu must correspond not

only to the generative themes but to the way in which these themes are perceived.

This requirement in turn implies another: the investigation of meaningful thematic.

Generative themes can be located in concentric circles, moving from the general

to the particular. The broadest epochal unit, which includes a diversified range of

units and sub-units -continental, regional, national, and so forth - contains themes

of a universal character. I consider the fundamental theme of our epoch to be that

of domination. This implies that the ob-jective to be achieved is liberation, its

opposite theme. It is that tormenting ‘themination’ which gives our epoch the

anthrop-ological character mentioned earlier. In order to achieve humanization,

which presupposes the elimination of dehuman-izing oppression, it is absolutely

necessary to surmount the limit-situations in which men are reduced to things.

Within the smaller circles, we find themes and limit-situations characteristic of

societies (on the same continent or on different continents) which, through these

themes and limit-situations, share historical similarities. For example,

underdevelopment, which cannot be understood apart from the relationship of

dependency, represents a limit-situation characteristic of societies of the Third

World. .The task implied by this limit-situation is to overcome the contradictory

relationship between these ‘object’ societies and the metropolitan societies; this

task constitutes the untested feasibility for the Third World.

Within the broader epochal unit, any specific society con-tains, in addition to the

universal, continental, or historically similar themes, its own particular themes-, its

own limit-situa-tions. Within yet smaller circles, thematic diversifications can be

found within the same society, divided into areas and sub-areas, all of which are

related to the societal whole. These constitute epochal sub-units. For example,

within the same national unit one can find the contradiction of the ‘coexistence of

the non-contemporaneous’.

Within these sub-units, national themes may or may not be perceived in their

true significance. They may simply be felt – sometimes not even that. But the non-

existence of themes within the sub-units is absolutely impossible. The fact that

individuals in a certain area do not perceive a generative theme, or perceive it in a

distorted way, may only reveal a limit-situation of oppression in which men are

still submerged.

In general, a dominated consciousness which has not yet perceived a limit-

situation in its totality apprehends only its epiphenomena and transfers to the latter

the inhibiting force which is the property of the limit-situation: This fact is of great

importance for the investigation of generative themes. When men lack a critical

understanding of their reality, apprehending it in fragments which they do not

perceive as interacting constituent elements of the whole, they cannot truly know

that reality. To know it truly, they would have to reverse their starting point: they

would need to have a total vision of the context in order subsequently to separate

and isolate its constituent elements and by means of this analysis to achieve a

clearer perception of the whole.

Equally appropriate for the methodology of thematic investi-gation and for

problem-posing education is this effort to present significant dimensions of an

individual’s contextual reality, the analysis of which will make it possible for him

to recognize the interaction of the various components. Meanwhile the significant

dimensions, which in their turn consist of parts in interaction, should be perceived

as dimensions of total reality. In this way, a critical analysis of a significant

existential dimension makes possible a new, critical attitude towards the limit-

situations. The perception and comprehension of reality are rectified and acquire

new depth. When carried out with a methodology of conscientization, the

investigation of the generative theme contained in the minimum thematic universe

(the generative themes in interaction) thus introduces or begins to introduce men to

a critical form of thinking about their world.

In the event, however, those men perceive reality as dense, impenetrable, and

enveloping, it is indispensable to proceed with the investigation by means of

abstraction. This method does not involve reducing .the concrete to the abstract

(which would negate its dialectical nature), but rather maintaining both elements as

opposites which interrelate dialectically in the act of reflection. This dialectical

movement of thought is exemplified perfectly in the analysis of a concrete,

existential, ‘coded’ situation, Its ‘decoding’ requires moving from the abstract to

the concrete; this requires moving from the part to the whole and then returning to

the parts; this in turn requires that the Subject recognize himself in the object (the

coded concrete existential situation) and recognize the object as a situation in

which he finds himself, together with other Subjects. If the de-coding is well done,

this movement of flux and reflux from the abstract to the concrete which occurs in

the analysis of a coded situation leads to the supersede of the abstraction by the

critical perception of the concrete, which has already ceased to be a dense,

impenetrable reality.

When an individual is presented with a coded existential situation (a sketch or a

photograph which leads by abstraction to the concreteness of existential reality),

his tendency is to ‘split’ that coded situation. In the process of decoding, this

separation corresponds to the stage we call the ‘description of the situation’, and

facilitates the discovery of the interaction among the parts of the disjoined whole.

This whole (the coded situation), which previously had been only diffusely

appre-hended, begins to acquire meaning as thought flows back to it from the

various dimensions. Since, however, the coding is the representation of an

existential situation, the decoder tends to take the step from the representation to

the very concrete situation in which and with which he finds himself. It is thus

possible to explain conceptually why individuals begin to behave differently in the

face of objective reality, once that reality has ceased to look like a blind alley and

has taken on its true aspect: a challenge which men must meet.

In all the stages of decoding, men exteriorize their view of the world. And in the

way they think about and face the world - fatalistically, dynamically, or statically -

their generative themes may be found. A group which does not concretely express

a generative thematic - a fact which might appear to imply the non-existence of

themes - is, on the contrary, suggesting a very dramatic theme: the theme of

silence. The theme of silence suggests a structure of muteness in the face of the

over-whelming force of the limit-situations.

I must re-emphasize that the generative theme cannot be found in men, divorced

from reality; nor yet in reality, divorced from men; much less in ‘no man’s land’. It

can only be appre-hended in the men-world relationship. To investigate the

generative theme is to investigate man’s thinking about reality and man’s action

upon reality, which is his praxis. For precisely this reason, the methodology

proposed requires the investigators and the people (who would normally be

considered objects of that investigation) to act as co-investigators. The more active

an attitude men take in regard to the exploration of their thematics, the more they

deepen their critical awareness of reality, and in spelling out those thematics, take

possession of that reality.

Some may think it inadvisable to include the people as investigators in the

search for their own meaningful thematics: that their intrusive influence (note, the

‘intrusion’ of those who are most interested - or ought to be - in their own

education) will ‘adulterate’ the findings and thereby sacrifice the objectivity of the

investigation. This view mistakenly presupposes that themes exist, in their original

objective purity, outside men - as if themes were things. Actually, themes exist in

men in their relations with the world, with reference to concrete facts. The same

objective fact could evoke different complexes of generative themes in different

epochal sub-units. There is, therefore, a relation between the given objective fact,

the perception men have of this fact, and the generative themes.

A meaningful thematics is naturally expressed by men, and a given moment of

expression will differ from an earlier moment, if men have changed their

perception of the objective facts to which the themes refer. From the investigator’s

point of view, the important thing is to detect the starting point at which men

visualize the ‘given’, then verify whether or not during the process of investigation

any transformation has occurred in their way of perceiving reality. (Objective

reality, of course, remains unchanged If the perception of that reality changes in

the course of the investigation, that fact does not impair the validity of the

investigation.)

We must realize that the aspirations, the motives, and the objectives implicit in

meaningful thematics are human aspira-tions, motives, and objectives. They do not

exist ‘out there’ somewhere, as static entities: they are occurring. They are as

historical as men themselves; consequently, they cannot be apprehended apart from

men. To apprehend these themes and to understand them is to understand both the

men who embody them and the reality to which they refer. But - precisely because

it is not possible to understand these themes apart from men -it is necessary for the

men concerned to understand them as well. Thematic investigation thus becomes a

common striving towards awareness of reality and self, thus making it a starting

point for the educational process or for cultural action of a liberating character;

The real danger of the investigation is not that the supposed objects of the

investigation, discovering themselves to be co-investigators, might ‘adulterate’ the

analytical results. On the contrary, the danger lies in the risk” of shifting the focus

of the investigation from the meaningful themes to the people them-selves, thereby

treating the people as objects of the investigation. Since this investigation is to

serve as a .basis for developing an educational programme in which teacher-

student and students-teachers combine their cognitions of the same object, the

in-vestigation itself must likewise be based, on reciprocity of action.

Thematic investigation, which occurs in the realm of the human, cannot be

reduced to a mechanical act. As a process of search, of knowledge, and thus of

creation, it requires the investigators to discover the interpenetration of problems,

in the linking of meaningful themes. The investigation will be most educational

when it is most critical and most critical when it avoids the narrow outlines of

partial or ‘focalized’ views of reality, and sticks to the comprehension of total

reality. Thus, the process of searching for the meaningful thematics should include

a concern for the links between themes, a concern to pose these themes as

problems, and a concern for their historical-cultural context.

Just as the educator may not elaborate a programme to present to the people,

neither may the investigator, starting from points he has predetermined, elaborate

‘itineraries’ for research into the thematic universe himself. Both education and the

investigation designed to support it must be ‘sympathetic’ activities, in the

etymological sense of the word. That is, they must consist of communication and

of the common experience of a reality perceived in the complexity of its constant

‘becoming’.

The investigator who, in the name of scientific objectivity, transforms the

organic into something inorganic, what is becoming into what is, life into death, is

a man who fears change. He does not see in change (not denying it, but not

desiring it either) a sign of life, but a sign of death and decay. He wants to study

change - but in order to stop it, not in order to stimulate or deepen it. However, in

seeing change as a sign of death and in making people the passive objects of

investiga-tion in order to arrive at rigid models, he betrays his own character as a

destroyer of life.

I repeat: the investigation of thematics involves the investi-gation of the

people’s thinking - thinking which occurs only in and among men seeking out

reality together. I cannot think for others or without others, nor can others think for

me. Even if the people’s thinking is superstitious or naive, it is only as they rethink

their assumptions in action that they can change. Producing and acting upon their

own ideas - not absorbing those of others - must constitute that process.

Men, as beings ‘in a situation’, find themselves rooted in temporal-spatial

conditions which mark them and which they also mark. They will tend to reflect on

their own ‘situationality’ to the extent that it challenges them to act upon it. Men

are because they are in a situation. And they will be more the more they not only

critically reflect upon their existence but critically act upon it.

Reflection upon situationality is reflection about the very condition of existence:

critical thinking through which men discover each other to be ‘in a situation’. Only

as this situation ceases to present itself as a dense, enveloping reality or a

tor-menting blind alley, and men can come to perceive it as an objective-

problematic situation - only then can commitment exist. Men emerge from their

submersion and acquire the ability to intervene in reality as it is unveiled.

Intervention in reality historical awareness itself - thus represents a step forward

from emergence, and results from the conscientization of the situa-tion.

Conscientization is the deepening of the attitude of awareness characteristic of all

emergence.

Every thematic investigation which deepens historical aware-ness is thus really

educational, while all authentic education investigates thinking. The more

educators and the people investigate the people’s thinking, and are thus jointly

educated, the more they continue to investigate. Education and thematic

investigation, in the problem-posing concept of education, are simply different

moments of the same process.

In contrast with the anti-dialogical and non-communicative ‘deposits’ of the

banking method of education, the programme content of the problem-posing

method - dialogical par excel-lence - is constituted and organized by the students’

view of the world, where their own generative themes are found. The content thus

constantly expands and renews itself. The task of the dialogical teacher in an

interdisciplinary team working on the thematic universe revealed by their

investigation is to ‘represent’ that universe to the people from whom he first

received , it and ‘represent’ it not as a lecture, but as a problem.

Let us say, for example, that a group has the responsibility of coordinating a

plan for adult education in a peasant area with a high percentage of illiteracy. The

plan includes a literacy campaign and a post-literacy phase. During the former

stage, problem-posing education seeks out and investigates the ‘generative word’;

in the post-literacy stage, it seeks out and investigates the ‘generative theme’.

Let us here, however, consider only the investigation of the generative themes or

the meaningful thematics. Once the investigators have determined the area in

which they will work and have acquired a preliminary acquaintance with it through

secondary sources, they initiate the first stage of the investigation. This beginning

(like any beginning in any human activity) involves difficulties and risks which are

to a certain point normal, although they are not always evident in the first contact

with the individuals of the area. In this first contact, the investigators need to get a

significant number of people to agree to an informal meeting during which they

can talk about their objectives in being in the area. In this meeting they explain the

reason for the investigation, how it is to be carried out, and what use will be made

of it; they further explain that the investigation will be impossible without a

relation of mutual understanding and trust. If the participants agree both to the

investigation and to the subsequent process, the investigators should call for

volunteers among the participants to serve as assistants. These volunteers will

gather a series of necessary data about the life of the area. Of even greater

importance, however, is the active presence of these volunteer in the investigation.

Meanwhile, the investigators begin their own visits to the area, never forcing

themselves, but acting as sympathetic ob-servers with an attitude of understanding

towards what they see. While it is normal for investigators to come to the area with

values which influence their perceptions, this does not mean that they may

transform the thematic investigation into a means of imposing these values. The

only dimension of these values which it is hoped the men whose thematics are

being investigated will come to share (it is presumed that the investigators possess

this quality) is a critical perception of the world, which implies a correct method of

approaching reality in order to unveil it. And critical perception cannot be

imposed. Thus, from the very beginning, thematic investigation is expressed as an

educational pursuit, as cultural action.

During their visits, the investigators set then- critical ‘aim* on the area under

study, as if it were for them an enormous, unique, living ‘code’ to be deciphered.

They regard the area as a totality, and in visit upon visit attempt to ‘split’ it by

analysing the partial dimensions which impress them. Through this process they

expand their understanding of how the various parts interact, which will later help

them penetrate the totality itself.

During this decoding stage, the investigators observe certain moments of the life

of the area - sometimes directly, sometimes by means of informal conversations

with the inhabitants. They register everything in their notebooks, including

apparently unimportant items: the way the people talk, their style of life, their

behaviour at church and at work. They record the idiom of the people: their

expressions, their vocabulary, and their syntax (not their incorrect pronunciation,

but rather the way they construct their thought).

It is essential for the investigators to observe the area under varying

circumstances: labour in the fields, meetings of a local association (noting the

behaviour of the participants, the langu-age used, and the relations between the

officers and the mem-bers), the role played by women and young people, leisure

hours, games and sports, conversations with people in their homes (noting

examples of husband-wife and parent-child relationships). No activity must escape

the attention of the investigators during the initial survey of the area.

After each observation visit, the investigator should draw up a brief report to be

discussed by the entire team, in order to evaluate the preliminary findings of both

the professional in-vestigators and the local assistants. To facilitate the

participa-tion of the assistants, the evaluation meetings should be held in the area

itself.

The evaluation meetings represent a second stage in the decoding of the unique

living code. As each person, in his decoding essay, relates how he perceived or felt

a certain event or situation, his exposition challenges all the other decoders by

representing to them the same reality upon which they have themselves been

intent. At this moment they ‘reconsider’, through the ‘considerations’ of others,

their own previous ‘consideration’. Thus the analysis of reality made by each

individual decoder sends them all back, dialogically, to the disjoined whole which

once more becomes a totality evoking a new analysis by the investigators,

following which a new evaluative and critical meeting will be held.

Representatives of the in-habitants participate in aft activities as members of the

investi-gating team.

The more the group divide and reintegrate the whole; the more closely they

approach the nuclei of the principal and secondary contradictions which involve

the inhabitants of the area. By locating these nuclei of contradictions, the

investigators might even at this stage be able to organize the programme con-tent

of their educational action. Indeed, if the content reflected these contradictions, it

would undoubtedly contain the meaningful thematics of the area. And one can

safely affirm that action based on these observations would be much more likely to

succeed than that based on ‘decisions from the top’. The investigators should not,

however, be tempted by this possibility. The basic thing, starting from the initial

perception of these nuclei of contradictions (which include the principal

con-tradiction of society as a larger epochal unit) is to study the inhabitants’ level

of awareness of these contradictions.

Intrinsically, these contradictions constitute limit-situations, involve themes, and

indicate tasks. If individuals are caught up in and are unable to separate themselves

from these limit-situations, their theme in reference to these situations is fatalism,

and the task implied, by the theme is the lack of a task. Thus, although the limit-

situations are objective realities which call forth needs in individuals, one must

investigate with these indi-viduals their level of awareness of these situations.

A limit-situation as a concrete reality can call forth from people in different

areas (and even in sub-areas of the same area) quite opposite themes and tasks.

Thus, the basic concern of the investigators should be to concentrate on the

knowledge of what Goldmann calls ‘real consciousness’ and the ‘potential

con-sciousness’. ‘Real consciousness [is] the result of the multiple obstacles and

deviations that the different factors of empirical reality put into opposition and

submit for realization by [the] potential consciousness.’

Real consciousness implies the impossibility of perceiving the ‘untested

feasibility’ which lies beyond the limit-situations. But whereas the untested

feasibility cannot be achieved at the level of ‘real [or present] consciousness’, it

can be realized through ‘testing action’ which reveals its hitherto unperceived

viability. The untested feasibility and real consciousness are related, as are testing

action and potential consciousness. Goldmann’s concept of ‘potential

consciousness’ is similar to what Nicolal terms ‘unperceived practicable solutions’

(our ‘un-tested feasibility’), in contrast to ‘perceived practicable solutions’ and

‘presently practised solutions’, which correspond to Goldmann’s ‘real

consciousness’. Accordingly, the fact that the investigators may in the first stage of

the investigation approximately apprehend the complex of contradictions does not

authorize them to begin to structure the programme content of educational action.

This perception of reality is still their own, not that of the people.

It is with the apprehension of the complex of contradictions that the second

stage of the investigation begins. Always acting as a team, the investigators will

select some of these contradictions to develop the codifications to be used in the

thematic investigation. Since the codifications (sketches or photographs) are the

objects which mediate the decoders in their critical analysis, the preparation of

these codifications must be guided by certain principles other than the usual ones

for making visual aids.

The first requirement is that these codifications must necessarily represent

situations familiar to the individuals whose thematics are being examined, so that

they can easily recognize the situations (and thus their own relation to them). It is

in-admissible (whether during the process of investigation or in the following

stage, when the meaningful thematics are presented as programme content) to

present pictures of reality unfamiliar to the participants. The latter procedure

(although dialectical, because individuals analysing an unfamiliar reality could

com-pare it with their own and discover the limitations of each) cannot come

before the more basic one dictated by the participants’ state of submersion, that is,

the process in which individuals analysing their own reality become aware of their

earlier, distorted perceptions and thereby arrive at a new perception of that reality.

An equally fundamental requirement for the preparation of codifications is that

their thematic nucleus be neither too explicit nor too enigmatic. The former may

degenerate into mere prop-aganda, with no real decoding to be done beyond stating

the obviously predetermined content. The latter runs the risk of appearing to be a

puzzle or a guessing game. Since they represent existential situations, the

codifications should be simple in their complexity and offer various decoding

possibilities in order to avoid the brain-washing tendencies of propaganda.

Codifications are not slogans; they are cognizable objects, challenges towards

which the critical reflection of the decoders should be directed.

In order to offer various possibilities of analysis in the decoding process, the

codifications should be organized as a ‘thematic fan’. As the decoders reflect on

them, the codifica-tions should open up in the direction of other themes. This

opening up (which does not occur if the thematic content is either too explicit or

too enigmatic) is indispensable to the perception of the dialectical relations which

exist between the themes and their opposites. Accordingly, the codifications

reflecting an existential situation must objectively constitute a totality. Its elements

must interact in the makeup of the whole.

In the process of decoding, the participants externalize their thematics and

thereby make explicit their ‘real consciousness’ of the world. As they do this, they

begin to see how they them-selves acted while actually experiencing the situation

they are now analysing, and thus reach a ‘perception of their previous perception’.

By achieving this awareness, they come to perceive reality differently; by

broadening the horizon of their perception, they discover more easily in their’

background awareness’ the dialectical relations between these two dimensions of

reality.

By stimulating ‘perception of the previous perception’ and ‘knowledge of the

previous knowledge’, decoding stimulates the appearance of a new perception and

the development of new knowledge. The new perception and knowledge are

systemati-cally continued with the inauguration of the educational plan, which

transforms the untested feasibility into testing action, as potential consciousness

supersedes real consciousness.

Preparing the codifications further requires that as far as possible they should

represent contradictions ‘inclusive’ of others which constitute the system of

contradictions of the area under study. As each of these ‘inclusive’ codifications is

prepared, the other contradictions ‘contained’ therein should also be codified. The

decoding of the former will be dialectically clarified by the decoding of the latter.

In this connection, a very valuable contribution to our method has been made by

Gabriel Bode, a young Chilean civil servant in one of the most significant Chilean

governmental institutions: the Institute de Desarrollo Agropecuario (IND AP)." In

the course of using this method in the post-literacy stage, Bode observed that the

peasants became interested in the discussion only when the codification related

directly to their felt needs. Any deviation in the codification, as well as any attempt

by the educator to guide the decoding discussion into other areas, produced silence

and indifference. On the other ‘ hand, he observed that even when the codification^

centred on their felt needs the peasants could not manage to concentrate

systematically on the discussion, which often digressed to the point of never

reaching a synthesis; Also, they almost never perceived the relationship of their felt

needs to the direct and indirect causes of these needs. One might say that they

failed to perceive the untested feasibility lying beyond the limit situations which

engendered their needs.

Bode then decided to experiment with the simultaneous projection of different

situations; in this technique lies the value of his contribution. Initially, he projects a

very simple codification of an existential situation. He terms his ‘first codification

‘es-sential’; it represents the basic nucleus and opens up into a. thematic fan

extending to ‘auxiliary’ codifications. After the essential codification is decoded,

the educator maintains its projected image as a reference for the participants and

successively projects alongside it the auxiliary codifications. By means of the

latter, which are directly related to the essential codification, he sustains the vivid

interest of the participants, who are thereby enabled to reach a synthesis.

The great achievement of Gabriel Bode is that, by means of the dialectics

between the essential and the auxiliary codifications, he has managed to

communicate to the participants a sense of totality. Individuals, who were

submerged in reality, merely feeling their needs, emerge from reality and perceive

the causes of their needs. In this way, they can go beyond the level of real

consciousness to that of potential consciousness much more rapidly.

Once the codifications have been prepared and all their poss-ible thematic facets

have been studied by the interdisciplinary team, the investigators begin the third

stage of the investigation by returning to the area to if initiate decoding dialogues

in the ‘thematic investigation circles’. These discussions, which decode the

material prepared in the preceding stage, are taped for sub-sequent analysis by the

interdisciplinary team.” In addition to the investigator acting as decoding co-

ordinator, two other specialists - a psychologist and a sociologist - attend the

meet-ings. Their task is to note and record the significant (and, apparently

insignificant) reactions of the decoders.

During the decoding process, the co-ordinator must not only listen to the

individuals but must challenge them, posing as ; problems both the codified

existential situation and their own answers. Due to the cathartic force of the

methodology, the participants of the thematic investigation circles externalize a

series of sentiments and opinions about themselves, the world, and others, that

perhaps they would not express under different circumstances.

In one of the thematic investigations carried out in Santiago, a group of

tenement residents discussed a scene showing a drunken man walking on the street

and three young men conversing on the corner. The group participants commented

that ‘the only one there who is productive and useful to his country is the souse

who is returning home after working all day for low wages and who is worried

about his family because he can’t take care of their needs. He is the only worker.

He is a decent worker and a souse like us.’

The investigators had intended to study aspects of alcohol-ism. He probably

would not have elicited the above responses if he had presented the participants

with a questionnaire he had elaborated himself. If asked directly, they might even

have denied ever taking a drink themselves. But in their comments on the

codification of an existential situation they could recognize, and in which they

could recognize themselves, they said what they really felt.

There are two important aspects to these declarations. On the one hand, they

verbalize the connection between earning low wages, feeling exploited, and getting

drunk - getting drunk ‘as a flight from reality, as an attempt to overcome the

frustra-tion of inaction, as an ultimately self-destructive solution. On the other

hand, they manifest the need to rate the drunkard highly. He is the ‘only one useful

to his country, because he works, while the others only gab’. After praising the

drunkard, the participants then identify themselves with him, as workers who also

drink - ‘decent workers’.

In contrast, imagine the failure of a moralistic educator, sermonizing against

alcoholism and presenting as an example of virtue something which for these men

is not a manifestation of virtue. In this and in other cases, the only sound procedure

is the conscientization of the situation, which should be attempted from the start of

the thematic investigation. (Obviously, conscientization does not stop at the level

of mere subjective perception of a situation, but through action prepares men for

the struggle against the obstacles to their humanization.)

In another experience, this time with peasants, I observed that the unchanging

motif during an entire discussion of a situation depicting work in the fields was the

demand for an increase in wages and the necessity of joining together to create a

union to obtain this particular demand. Three situations were discussed during the

session, and the motif was always the same.

Now imagine an educator who has organized his educational programme for

these men, consisting of reading ‘wholesome’ texts in which one learns that ‘the

water is in the well’. But precisely this type of thing happens all the time in both

educa-tion and politics, because it is not realized that the dialogical nature of

education begins with thematic investigation.

Once the decoding in the circles has been completed, the last stage of the

investigation begins, as the investigators under-take a systematic interdisciplinary

study of their findings.

Listening to the tapes recorded during the decoding sessions and studying the

notes taken by the psychologist and the sociologist, the investigators begin to list

the themes explicit or implicit in the affirmations made during the sessions. These

themes should be classified according to the various social sciences. Classification

does not mean that when the programme is elaborated the themes will be seen as

belonging to isolated categories, but only that a theme is viewed in a specific

manner by each of the social sciences to which it is related. The theme of

development, for example, is especially appropriate to the field of economics, but

not exclusively so. This theme would also be focalized by sociology, anthropology,

and social psychology (fields concerned with cultural change and with the

modification of attitudes and values - questions which are equally relevant to a

philosophy of development). It would be focalized by political science (a field

concerned with the decisions which involve development), by education, and so

forth. In this way, the themes which characterize a totality will never be

approached rigidly. It would indeed be a pity if the themes, after being investigated

in the richness of their interpenetration with other aspects of reality, were

subsequently to be handled in such a way as to sacrifice their richness (and hence

their force) to the strictures of specialties.

Once the thematic demarcation is completed, each specialist presents to the

interdisciplinary team a project for the ‘break-down ‘of his theme. In breaking

down the theme, the specialist looks for the fundamental nuclei which, comprising

learning units and establishing a sequence, give a general view of the theme. As

each specific project is discussed, the other specialists make suggestions. These

may be incorporated into the project and/or may be included in the brief essays to

be written on the theme. These essays, to which bibliographic suggestions are

an-nexed, are valuable aids in training the teacher-students who will work in the

‘culture circles’.

During this effort to break down the meaningful thematics, the team will

recognize the need to include some fundamental themes which were not directly

suggested by the people during the preceding investigation. The introduction of

these themes has proved to be necessary, and also corresponds to the dialogical

character of education. If educational programming is dialogical, the teacher-

students also have the right to participate by including themes not previously

suggested. I call the latter type of theme ‘hinged themes’, owing to their function.

They may either facilitate the connection between two themes in the programme

unit, filling a possible gap between the two; or they may illustrate the relations

between the general programme content and the view of the world held by the

people. Hence, one of these themes may be located at the beginning of thematic

units.

The anthropological concept of culture is one of these hinged themes. It clarifies

the role of men in the world and with the world as transforming rather than

adaptive beings.

Once the breakdown of the thematics is completed, there follows the stage of its

‘codification’: choosing the best channel of communication for each theme and its

representation, A codification may be simple or compound. The former utilizes

either the visual (pictorial or graphic), the tactile, or the auditive channel; the latter

utilizes various channels. The selection of the pictorial OF graphic channel depends

not only on the material to be codified, but also on whether or not the indiv-iduals

with whom one wishes to communicate are literate.

After the thematics has been codified, the didactic material (photographs, slides,

film strips, posters, reading texts, and so forth) is prepared. The team may propose

some themes or aspects of some themes to outside specialists as topics for recorded

interviews.

Let us take the theme of development as an example. The team approaches two

or more economists of varying schools of thought, tells them about the programme,

and invites them to contribute an interview on the subject in language

compre-hensible to the audience. If the specialists accept, an interview of fifteen to

twenty minutes is taped. A photograph may be taken of each specialist while he is

speaking.

When the taped interview is presented to the culture circle, an introductory

statement indicates who each speaker is, what he has written, what he has done,

and what he is doing now; meanwhile, his photograph is projected on a screen. If,

for instance, the speaker is a university professor, the introduction could include a

discussion regarding what the participants think of universities and what they

expect of them. The group has already been told that the recorded interview will be

followed by a discussion of its contents (which function as an auditive

codification). The team subsequently reports to the specialist the reaction of the

participants during the discussion. This technique links intellectuals, often well-

intentioned, but not infrequently alienated from “the reality of the people, to that

reality. It also gives the people an opportunity to bear and criticize the thought of

intellectuals.

Some themes or nuclei may be presented by means of brief dramatizations,

containing the theme only - no ‘solutions’! The dramatization acts as a

codification, as a problem-posing situation to be discussed.

Another didactic resource - as long as it is carried out within a problem-posing

rather than a banking approach to education is the reading and discussion of

magazine articles, newspapers, and book chapters (beginning with passages). As in

the case of the recorded interviews, the author is introduced before the group

begins, and the contents are discussed afterwards.

Along the same lines, it is indispensable to analyse the con-tents of newspaper

editorials following any given event: ‘Why do different newspapers have such

different interpretations of the same fact?’ This practice helps develop a sense of

criticism, so that people will react to newspapers or news broadcasts not as passive

objects of the ‘communiqué’s’ directed at them, but rather as consciousnesses

seeking to be free.

With all the didactic material prepared, to which should be added small

introductory manuals, the team of educators is ready to represent to the people

their own thematics, in systematized and amplified form. The thematics which

have come from the people return to them - not as contents to be deposited,’ but as

problems to be solved.

The first task of the basic education teachers is to present the general

programme of the educational campaign. The people will find themselves in this

programme; it will not seem strange to them, since it originated with them. The

educators will also explain (based on the dialogical character of education), the

presence in the programme of the hinged themes, and their significance.

If the educators lack sufficient funds to carry out the preliminary thematic

investigation as described above, they can with a minimum knowledge of the

situation - select some basic themes to serve as ‘codifications to be investigated’.

Accordingly, they can begin with introductory themes and simultaneously initiate

further thematic investigation.

One of these basic themes (and one which I consider central and indispensable)

is the anthropological concept of culture. Whether men are peasants or urban

workers, learning to read or enrolled in a post-literacy programme, the starting

point of their search to know more (in the instrumental meaning of the term) is the

debate of the concept. As they discuss the world of culture, they express their level

of awareness of reality, in which various themes are implicit. Their discussion

touches upon other aspects of reality, which comes to be perceived in an

increasingly critical manner. These aspects in turn involve many other themes.

With the experience now behind me, I can affirm that the concept of culture,

discussed imaginatively in all or most of its dimensions, can provide various

aspects of an educational programme. In addition, after several days of dialogue

with the culture circle participants, the educators can ask the participants directly:

‘What other themes or subjects could we discuss besides these?’ As each person

replies, the answer is noted down and is immediately proposed to the group as a

problem.

One of the group members may say, for example: ‘I’d like to talk about

nationalism.’ ‘Very well,’ says the educator, noting down the suggestion, and adds:

‘What does nationalism mean? Why is a discussion about nationalism of any

interest to us?’ My experience shows that when a suggestion is posed as a problem

to the group, new themes appear. If, in an area where (for example) thirty culture

circles meet on the same night, all the ‘co-ordinators’ ‘(educators) proceed in this

fashion, the central team will have a rich variety of thematic material for study.

The important thing, from the point of view of libertarian education, is for men

to come to feel like masters of their thinking by discussing the thinking and views

of the world explicitly or implicitly manifest in their own suggestions and those of

their comrades. Because this view of education starts with the conviction that it

cannot present its own programme but must search for this programme dialogically

with the people, it serves to introduce the pedagogy of the oppressed, in the

development of which the oppressed must participate.

Chapter 4

This chapter, which analyses the theories of cultural action that develop from

anti-dialogical and dialogical matrices, will make frequent reference to points

presented in the previous chapters, either to expand these points or to clarify new

affirmations.

I shall start by reaffirming that men, as beings of the praxis, differ from animals,

which are beings of pure activity. Animals do not consider the world; they are

immersed in it. In contrast, men emerge from the world, objectify it, and in so

doing can understand and transform it with their labour.

Animals, which do not labour, live in a setting which they cannot transcend.

Hence, each animal species lives in the context appropriate to it, and these

contexts, while open to men, cannot communicate among themselves.

But men’s activity consists of action and reflection: it is praxis; it is

transformation of the world. And as praxis, it requires theory to illuminate it.

Men’s activity is theory and practice; it is reflection and action. It cannot, as I

stressed in chapter 2, be reduced to either verbalism or activism.

Lenin’s famous statement: ‘Without a revolutionary theory there can be no

revolutionary movement’ (see Henry M. Christian edition) means that a revolution

is achieved with neither verbalism nor activism, but rather with praxis, that is, with

reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed. The revolutionary

effort to transform these structures radically cannot designate its leaders as its

thinkers and the oppressed as mere doers.

If true commitment to the people, involving the transforma-tion of the reality by

which they are oppressed, requires a theory of transforming action, this theory

cannot fail to assign to the people a fundamental role in the transformation process.

The leaders cannot treat the oppressed as mere activists to be denied the

opportunity of reflection and allowed merely the illusion of acting, whereas in fact

they would continue to be manipulated - and in this case by the presumed foes of

manipulation.

The leaders do bear the responsibility for co-ordination - and, at times, direction

- but leaders who deny praxis to the op-pressed thereby invalidate their own praxis.

By imposing then-word on others, they falsify that word and establish a

contra-diction between their methods and their objectives. If they are truly

committed to liberation, their action and reflection can-not proceed without the

action and reflection of others.

Revolutionary praxis must stand opposed to the praxis of the dominant elites, for

they are by nature antithetical. Revolution-ary praxis cannot tolerate an absurd

dichotomy in which the praxis of the people is merely that of following the

leaders’ decisions - a dichotomy reflecting the prescriptive methods of the

dominant elites. Revolutionary praxis is a unity, and the leaders cannot treat the

oppressed as their possession.

Manipulation, sloganizing, “depositing’, regimentation, and prescription cannot

be components of revolutionary praxis, precisely because they are components of

the praxis of domina-tion. In order to dominate, the dominator has no choice but to

deny true praxis to the people, deny them the right to say their own word and think

their own thoughts. He cannot act dialogically; for him to do so would mean either

that he had relin-quished his power to dominate and joined the cause of the

oppressed, or that he had lost that power through miscalculation.

Conversely, revolutionary leaders who do not act dialogically in their relations

with the people either have retained characteristics of the dominator and are not

truly revolutionary; or they are totally misguided in their conception of their role,

and prisoners of their own sectarianism - are equally non-revolutionary. They may

even reach power. But the validity of any revolution resulting from anti-dialogical

action is thoroughly doubtful.

It is absolutely essential that the oppressed participate in the revolutionary

process with an increasingly critical awareness of their role as Subjects of the

transformation. If they are drawn into the process as ambiguous beings, partly

themselves and partly the oppressors housed within them - and if they come to

power still embodying that ambiguity imposed on them by the situation of

oppression - it is my contention that they will merely imagine they have reached

power. Their existential duality may even facilitate the rise of a sectarian climate

leading to the installation of bureaucracies which undermine the revolu-tion. If the

oppressed do not become aware of this ambiguity during the course of the

revolutionary process, they may participate in that process with a spirit more

revanchist than revolutionary. They may aspire to revolution as a means of

domination, rather than as a road to liberation.

If revolutionary leaders who incarnate a genuine humanism have difficulties, the

difficulties and problems will be far greater for a group of leaders who try (even

with the best of intentions) to carry out the revolution for the people. To attempt

this is equivalent to carrying out a revolution without the people, because the

people are drawn into the process by the same methods and procedures used to

oppress them.

Dialogue with the people is radically necessary to every authentic revolution.

This is what makes it a revolution, as distinguished from a military coup. One does

not expect dialogue from a coup - only deceit (in order to achieve ‘legitimacy’) or

force (in order to repress). Sooner or later, a true revolution must initiate a

courageous dialogue with the people. Its very legitimacy lies in that dialogue. It

cannot fear the people, their expression, their effective participation in power. It

must be accountable to them, must speak frankly to them of its achievements, its

mistakes, its miscalculations, and its difficulties.

The earlier dialogue begins the more truly revolutionary will the movement be.

This dialogue which is radically necessary to revolution corresponds to another

radical need: that of men as beings who cannot be truly human apart from

communication, for they are essentially communicative creatures. To impede

communication is to reduce men to the status of ‘things’ and that is a job for

oppressors, not for revolutionaries.

Let me emphasize that my defence of the praxis implies no dichotomy by which

this praxis could be divided into a prior stage of reflection and a subsequent stage

of action. Action and reflection occur simultaneously. A critical analysis of reality

may, however, reveal that a particular form of action is im-possible or

inappropriate at the present time. Those who through reflection perceive the

unfeasibility or inappropriate-ness of one or another form of action (which should

accordingly be postponed or substituted) cannot thereby be accused of in-action.

Critical reflection is also action.

I previously stated that in education the attempt of the teacher-student to

understand a cognizable object is not ex-hausted in that object, because his act

extends to other students-teachers in such a way that the cognizable object

mediates their capacity for understanding. The same is true of revolutionary action.

That is, the oppressed and the leaders are equally the Subjects of revolutionary

action, and reality serves as the med-ium for the transforming action of both

groups. In this theory of action one cannot speak of an actor, nor simply of actors,

but rather of actors in intercommunication.

This affirmation might appear to imply division, dichotomy, and rupture of the

revolutionary forces; in fact, it signifies exactly the opposite: their communion.

Apart from this communion, we do see dichotomy: leaders on one side and people

on the other, in a replica of the relations of oppression. Denial of communion in the

revolutionary process, avoidance of dialogue with the people under the pretext of

organizing them, of strengthening revolutionary power, or of ensuring a united

front, is really a fear of freedom. It is fear of or lack of faith in the people. But if

the people cannot be trusted, there is no reason for liberation; in this case the

revolution is not even carried out for the people, but ‘by’ the people for the

leaders: a complete self-negation.

The revolution is made neither by the leaders for the people, nor by the people

for the leaders, but by both acting together in unshakeable solidarity. This

solidarity is born only when the leaders witness to it by their humble, loving, and

courageous encounter with the people. Not all men have sufficient courage for this

encounter - but when men avoid encounter they become inflexible and treat others

as mere objects; instead of nurturing life they kill life; instead of searching for life,

they flee from it. And these are oppressor characteristics.

Some may think that to affirm dialogue - the encounter of men in the world to

transform the world - is naively and subjectively idealistic. There is nothing,

however, more real or concrete than men in the world and with the world, than

men with other men - and some men against others, as oppressing and oppressed

classes.

Authentic revolution attempts to transform the reality which begets this

dehumanizing state of affairs. Those whose interests are served by that reality

cannot carry out this transformation; it must be achieved by the tyrannized, with

their leaders. This truth, however, must become radically consequential; that is, the

leaders must incarnate it, through communion with the people. In this communion

both groups grow together, and the leaders, instead of being simply self-appointed,

are installed or authenticated in their praxis with the praxis of the people.

Many persons, bound to a mechanistic view of reality, do not perceive that the

concrete situation of men conditions their consciousness of the world, and that in

turn this consciousness conditions their attitudes and their ways of dealing with

reality. They think that reality can be transformed mechanistically without posing

men’s false consciousness of reality as a problem or, through revolutionary action,

developing a consciousness which is less and less false. There is no historical

reality which is not human. There is no history without men, and no history for

men; there is only history of men, made by men and (as Marx pointed out) in turn

making them. It is when the majorities are denied their right to participate hi

history as Subjects that they become dominated and alienated. Thus, to supersede

their condition as objects by the status of Subjects - the objective of any true

revolution - requires the people to act, as well as reflect, upon the reality to be

transformed.

It would indeed be idealistic to affirm that, by merely reflecting on oppressive

reality and discovering their status as objects, men have thereby already become

Subjects. But while this perception in and of itself does not mean that men have

become Subjects, it does mean, as one of my co-investigators affirmed, that they

are ‘Subjects in expectancy’ - an expectancy which leads them to seek to solidify

their new status.

On the other hand, it would be a false premise to believe that activism (which is

not true action) is the road to revolution. Men will be truly critical if they live the

plenitude of the praxis, that is, if their action encompasses a critical reflection

which increasingly organizes their thinking and thus leads them to move from a

purely naive knowledge of reality to a higher level, one which enables them to

perceive the causes of reality. If revolutionary leaders deny this right to the people,

they impair their own capacity to think - or at least to think correctly.

Revolutionary leaders cannot think without the people, or for the people, but only

with the people.

The dominant elites, on the other hand, can - and do - think without the people -

although they do not permit themselves the luxury of failing to think about the

people in order to know them better and thus dominate them more efficiently.

Consequently, any apparent dialogue or communication between the elites and the

masses is really the depositing of ‘communiqués’, whose contents are intended to

exercise a domesticating influence.

Why do the dominant elites not become debilitated when they do not think with

the people ? Because the latter constitute their antithesis, their very reason for

existence. If the elites were to think with the people, the contradiction would be

superseded and they could no longer dominate. From the point of view of the

dominators in any epoch, correct thinking pre-supposes the non-thinking of the

people. Niebuhr writes:

A Mr Giddy, later President of the Royal Society raised objections which could

be matched in every country; ‘However specious in theory the project might be of

giving education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would be prejudicial to

their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life instead

of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious employments;

instead of teaching them subordination it would render them fractious, and

refractory as was evident in the manufacturing countries; it would enable them to

read seditious pamphlets, vicious books and publications against Christianity; it

would render them insolent to their superiors and in a few years the legislature

would find it necessary to direct the strong arm of power against them.’

What Mr Giddy really wanted (and what the elites of today want, although they

do not denounce popular education so cynically and openly) was for the people not

to think. Since the Mr Giddys of all epochs, as an oppressor class, cannot think

with the people, neither can they let the people think for themselves.

The same is not true, however, of revolutionary leaders; if they do not think with

the people, they become devitalized. The people are their constituent matrix, not

merely objects thought’ of. Although revolutionary leaders may also have to think

about the people in order to understand them better, this thinking differs from that

of the elite; for in thinking about the people in order to liberate (rather than

dominate) them, the leaders give of themselves to the thinking of the people. One

is the thinking of the master’, the other is the thinking of the comrade.

Domination, by its very nature, requires only a dominant pole and a dominated

pole in antithetical contradiction; revo-lutionary liberation, which attempts to

resolve this contradiction, implies the existence not only of these poles but also of

a leadership group which emerges during this attempt. This leadership group either

identifies itself with the oppressed state of the people, or it is not revolutionary. To

simply think about the people, as the dominators do, without any self-giving in that

thought, to fail to think with the people, is a sure way to cease being revolutionary

leaders.

In the process of oppression the elites subsist on the ‘living death’ of the

oppressed and find their authentication in the vertical relationship between

themselves and the latter; in the revolutionary process there is only one way for the

emerging leaders to achieve authenticity: they must ‘die’, in order to be reborn

through and with the oppressed.

We can legitimately say that in the process of oppression someone oppresses

someone else; we cannot say that in the process of revolution someone liberates

someone else, nor yet that someone liberates himself, but rather that men in

com-munion liberate each other. This affirmation is not meant to undervalue the

importance of revolutionary leaders but, on the contrary, to emphasize their value.

What could be more important than to live and work with the oppressed, with the

‘rejects of life’, with the ‘wretched of the earth’? In this communion, the

revolutionary leaders should find not only their raison d’etre but a motive for

rejoicing. By their very nature, revolu-tionary leaders can do what the dominant

elites - by their very nature - are unable to do in authentic terms.

Every approach to the oppressed by the elites, as a class, is couched in terms of

the false generosity described in chapter 1. But the revolutionary leaders cannot be

falsely generous, nor can they manipulate. Whereas the oppressor elites flourish by

trampling the people underfoot, the revolutionary leaders can flourish only in

communion with the people. Thus it is that the activity of the oppressor cannot be

humanist, while that of the revolutionary is necessarily so.

The inhumanity of the oppressors and revolutionary human-ism both make use

o/science. But science and technology at the service of the former are used to

reduce men to the status of ‘things’; at the service of the latter, they are used to

promote humanization. The oppressed must become Subjects of the latter process,

however, lest they continue to be seen as mere objects of scientific interest.

Scientific revolutionary humanism cannot, in the name of revolution, treat the

oppressed as objects to be analysed and (based on that analysis) presented with

prescriptions for be-haviour. To do this would be to fall into one of the myths of

the oppressor ideology; the absolutizing of ignorance. This myth implies the

existence of someone who decrees the ignorance of someone else. The one who is

doing the decreeing defines him-self and the class to which he belongs as those

who know or were born to know; he thereby defines others as alien entities. The

words of his own class come to be the ‘true’ words, which he imposes or attempts

to impose on the others: the oppressed, whose words have been stolen from them.

Those who steal the words of others develop a deep doubt in the abilities of the

others and consider them incompetent. Each time they say their word without

hearing the word of those whom they have forbidden to speak, they grow more

accustomed to power and acquire a taste for guiding, ordering, and commanding.

They can no longer live without having someone to give orders to. Under these

circumstances, dialogue is impossible.

Scientific and humanist revolutionary leaders, on the other hand, cannot believe

in the myth of the ignorance of the people. They do not have the right to doubt for

a single moment that it is only a myth. They cannot believe that they, and only

they, know anything - for this means to doubt the people. Although they may

legitimately recognize themselves as having, due to their revolutionary

consciousness, a level of revolutionary knowledge different from the level of

empirical knowledge held by the people, they cannot impose themselves and their

know-ledge on the people. They cannot sloganize the people, but must enter into

dialogue with them, so that the people’s empirical knowledge of reality, nourished

by the leader.;’ critical know-ledge, gradually becomes transformed into

knowledge of the causes of reality.

It would be naive to expect oppressor elites to denounce the myth which

absolutizes the ignorance of the people; it would be a contradiction in terms if

revolutionary leaders were not to do so, and more contradictory still were they to

act in accordance with that myth. The task of revolutionary leaders is to pose as

problems not only this myth, but all the other myths used by the oppressor elites to

oppress. If, instead, revolutionary leaders persist in imitating the oppressors”

methods of domination, the people may respond in either of two ways. In certain

historical circumstances, they may become domesticated by the new contents

which the leaders deposit in them. In other circumstances, they may become

frightened by a ‘word’ which threatens the oppressor housed within them. In

neither event do they become revolutionary. In the first case, the revolution is an

illusion; in the second case, an impossibility.

Some well-intentioned but misguided persons suppose that since the dialogical

process is prolonged (which, incidentally, is not true), they ought to carry out the

revolution without communication, by means of ‘communiqué’s, and that once the

revolution is won, they will then develop a thoroughgoing educational effort. They

further justify this procedure by saying that it is not possible to carry out education

- liberating education - before taking power.

It is worth analysing some fundamental points of the above assertions. These

men (or most of them) believe in the necessity for dialogue with the people, but do

not believe this dialogue is feasible prior to taking power. When they deny the

possibility that the leaders can behave in a critically educational fashion before

taking power, they deny the revolution’s educational quality as cultural action

preparing to become Cultural Revolution. On the other .hand, they confuse cultural

action with the new education to be inaugurated once power is taken.

I have already affirmed that it would indeed be naive to expect the oppressor

elites to carry out a liberating education. But because the revolution undeniably has

an educational nature, in the sense that unless it liberates it is not revolution, the

taking of power is only one moment - no matter how decisive - in the revolutionary

process. As process, the ‘before’ of the revolution is located within the oppressor

society and is apparent only to the revolutionary consciousness.

The revolution is born as a social entity within the oppressor society; to the

extent that it is cultural action, it cannot fail to correspond to the potentialities of

the social entity in which it originated. Every entity develops (or is transformed)

within itself, through the interplay of its contradictions. External conditioners,

while necessary, are effective only if they coincide with those potentialities. The

newness of the revolution is generated within the old, oppressive society; the

taking of power constitutes only a decisive moment of the continuing revolutionary

process. In a dynamic, rather than static, view of revolution, there is no absolute

‘before’ or ‘after’, with the taking of power as the dividing line.

Originating in objective conditions, revolution seeks to supersede the situation

of oppression by inaugurating a society of men in the process of continuing

liberation. The educational, dialogical quality of revolution, which makes it a

‘cultural revolution’ as well, must be present in all its stages. This educational

quality is one of the most effective instruments for keeping the revolution from

becoming institutionalized and stratified in a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy;

for counter-revolution is carried out by revolutionaries who become reactionary.

Were it not possible to dialogue with the people before power is taken, because

they have no experience with dialogue, neither would it be possible for the people

to come to power, for they are equally inexperienced in the use of power. The

revolutionary process is dynamic, and it is in this continuing dynamics, in the

praxis of the people with the revolutionary leaders, that the people and the leaders

will learn both dialogue and the use of power. (This is as obvious as affirming that

a man learns to swim in the water, not in a library.)

Dialogue with the people is neither a concession nor a gift, much less a tactic to

be used for domination. Dialogue, as the encounter among men to ‘name’ the

world, is a fundamental precondition for their true humanization. In the words of

Gajo Petrovic:

A free action can only be one by which a man changes his world and himself....

A positive condition of freedom is the knowledge of the limits of necessity, the

awareness of human creative possibilities..,. The struggle for a free society is not a

struggle for a free society unless through it an ever greater degree of individual

freedom is created. If this view be true, the revolutionary process is eminently

educational in character. Thus the road to revolution involves openness to the

people, not imperviousness to them; it involves communion with the people, not

mistrust. And, as Lenin pointed out, the more a revolution requires theory, the

more its leaders must be with the people in order to stand against the power of

oppression.

Based on these general propositions, let us undertake a more lengthy analysis of

the theories of anti-dialogical and dialogical action.

Conquest

The first characteristic of anti-dialogical action is the necessity for conquest. The

anti-dialogical man, in his relations with other men, aims at conquering them -

increasingly and by every means, from the toughest to the most refined, from the

most repressive to the most solicitous (paternalism).

Every act of conquest implies a conqueror and someone or something which is

conquered. The conqueror imposes his objectives on the vanquished, and makes

them his possession. He imposes his own contours on the vanquished, who

internal-ize this shape and become ambiguous beings ‘housing’ another. From the

first, the act of conquest, which reduces men to the status of things, is necrophilic.

Just as anti-dialogical action is a concomitant of the real, concrete situation of

oppression, dialogical action is indispens-able to the revolutionary supersedence of

that situation. A man is not anti-dialogical or dialogical in the abstract, but in the

world. He is not first anti-dialogical, then oppressor; he is both, simultaneously.

Within an objective situation of oppression, anti-dialogue is necessary to the

oppressor as a means of further oppression - not only economic, but cultural: the

vanquished are dispossessed of their word, their expressiveness, their culture.

Further, once a situation of oppression has been initiated, anti-dialogue becomes

indispensable to its preservation.

Because liberating action is dialogical in nature, dialogue can-not be a posteriori

to that action, but must be concomitant with it. And since liberation must be a

permanent condition, dialogue becomes a continuing aspect of liberating action.

The desire for conquest (or rather the necessity of conquest) is at all times

present in anti-dialogical action. To this end the oppressors attempt to destroy in

men their quality as ‘considerers’ of the world. Since the oppressors cannot totally

achieve this destruction, they must mythicize the world. In order to present for the

consideration of the oppressed and subjugated a world of deceit designed to

increase then- alienation and passivity, the oppressors develop a series of methods

precluding any presentation of the world as a problem and showing it rather as a

fixed entity, as something given - something to which men, as mere spectators,

must adapt.

It is necessary for the oppressors to approach the people in order to keep them

passive via subjugation. This approxima-tion, however, does not involve being

with the people, or require true communication. It is accomplished by the

oppressors’ depositing myths indispensable to the preservation of the status quo:

for example, the myth that the oppressive order is a ‘free society’; the myth that all

men are free to work where they wish, that if they don’t like their boss they can

leave him and look for another job; the myth that this order respects human rights

and is therefore worthy of esteem; the myth that anyone who is industrious can

become an entrepreneur - worse yet, the myth that the street vendor is as much an

entrepreneur as the owner of a large factory; the myth of the universal right of

education, when of all the Brazilian children who enter primary schools only a tiny

fraction ever reach the university; the myth of the equality of all men, when the

question: ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’ is still current among us; the myth

of the heroism of the oppressor classes as defenders of ‘Western Christian

civilization’ against ‘materialist barbarism’; the myth of the charity and generosity

of the elites, when what they really do as a class is to foster selective ‘good deeds’

(subse-quently elaborated into the myth of ‘disinterested aid’, which on the

international level was severely criticized by Pope John XXIII); the myth that the

dominant elites, ‘recognizing their duties’, promote the advancement of the people,

so that the people, in a gesture of gratitude, should accept the words of the elites

and conform to them; the myth that rebellion is a sin against God; the myth of

private property as fundamental to personal human development (so long as

oppressors are the only true human beings); the myth of the industriousness of the

oppressors and the laziness and dishonesty of the oppressed, as well as the myth of

the natural inferiority of the latter and the superiority of the former.”

All these myths (and others the reader could list), the internalization of which is

essential to the subjugation of the oppressed, are presented to them by well-

organized propa-ganda and slogans, via the mass ‘communications’ media - as if

such alienation constituted real communication!

In sum, there is no oppressive reality which is not at the same time necessarily

anti-dialogical, just as there is no anti-dialogue in which the oppressors do not

untiringly dedicate themselves to the constant conquest of the oppressed. In ancient

Rome, the dominant elites spoke of the need to give ‘bread and circuses’ to the

people in order to ‘soften them up’ and to secure their own tranquillity. The

dominant elites of today, like those of any epoch, continue (in a version of

‘original sin’) to need to conquer others - with or without bread and circuses. The

content and methods of conquest vary historically; what does not vary (as long as

dominant elites exist) is the necrophilic passion to oppress.

Divide and rule

This is another fundamental dimension of the theory of oppressive action which

is as old as oppression itself. As the oppressor minority subordinates and

dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in

power. The minority cannot permit itself the luxury of tolerating the unification of

the people, which would undoubtedly signify a serious threat to their own

hegemony. Accordingly, the oppressors halt by any method (including violence)

any action which even in incipient fashion could awaken the oppressed to the need

for unity. Concepts such as unity, organization, and struggle, are immediately

labelled as dangerous. In fact, of course, these concepts are dangerous - to the

oppressors - for their realization is necessary to actions of liberation.

It is in the interest of the oppressor to weaken the oppressed still further, to

isolate them, to create and deepen rifts among them. This is done by varied means,

from the repressive methods of the government bureaucracy to the forms of

cultural action with which they manipulate the people by giving them the

impression that they are being helped,

One of the characteristics of oppressive cultural action which is almost never

perceived by the dedicated but naive professionals who are involved is the

emphasis on a focalized view of problems rather than on seeing them as

dimensions of a totality. In ‘community development’ projects the more a region or

area is broken down into ‘local communities’, without the study of these

communities both as totalities in themselves and as parts of another totality (the

area, region, and so forth) - which in its turn is part of a still larger totality (the

nation, as part of the continental totality) - the more alienation is intensified. And

the more alienated people are, the easier it is to divide them and keep them divided.

These focalized forms of action, by intensifying the focalized way of life of the

oppressed (especially in rural areas), hamper the oppressed from perceiving reality

critically and keep them isolated from the problems of oppressed men in other

areas.

The same divisive effect occurs in connection with the so-called ‘leadership

training courses, which are (although carried out without any such intention by

many of their organizers) in the last analysis alienating. These courses are based on

the naive assumption that one can promote the community by training its leaders -

as if it were the parts that promote the whole and not the whole which, in being

promoted, promotes the parts. Those members of the communities who show

suf-ficient leadership capacities to be chosen for these courses necessarily reflect

and express the aspirations of the individuals of their community. They are in

harmony with the way of living and thinking about reality which characterizes

their comrades, even though they reveal special abilities which give them the status

of ‘leaders’. As soon as they complete the course and return to the community with

resources they did not formerly possess, they either use these resources to control

the submerged and dominated consciousness of their comrades, or they become

strangers in their own communities and their former leadership position is thus

threatened. In order not to lose their leadership status, they will probably tend to

continue manipulating the community, but in a more efficient manner.

When cultural action, as a totalized and totalizing process, approaches an entire

community and not merely its leaders, the opposite process occurs. Either the

former leaders grow along with everyone else, or they are replaced by new leaders

who emerge as a result of the new social consciousness of the com-munity.

The oppressors do not favour promoting the community as a whole, but rather

selected leaders. The latter course, by preserving a state of alienation, hinders the

emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in a total reality. And without

this critical intervention, it is always difficult to achieve the unity of the oppressed

as a class.

Class conflict is another concept which upsets the oppressors, since they do not

wish to consider themselves an oppressive class. Unable to deny, try as they may,

the existence of social classes, they preach the need for understanding and

harmony between those who buy and those who are obliged to sell their labour.

However, the unconceivable antagonism which exists between the two classes

makes this ‘harmony’ impossible. The elites call for harmony between classes as if

classes were fortuitous agglomerations of individuals curiously looking at a shop

window on a Sunday afternoon. The only harmony which is viable and

demonstrable is that found among the oppressors themselves. Although they may

diverge and upon occasion even clash over group interests, they unite immediately

at a threat to the class. Similarly, the harmony of the oppressed is only possible

when its members are engaged in the struggle for liberation. Only in exceptional

cases is it not only possible but necessary for both classes to unite and act in

harmony; but when the emergency which united them has passed they will return

to the contradiction which defines their existence and which never really

disappeared.

All the actions of the dominant class manifest its need to divide in order to

facilitate the preservation of the oppressor state. Its interference in the unions,

favouring certain ‘representatives’ of the dominated classes (who actually

represent the oppressor, not their own comrades); its promotion of individuals who

reveal leadership capacity and could signify a threat if they were not ‘softened up’

in this way; its distribution of benefits to some and penalties to others: all these are

ways of dividing in order to preserve the system which favours the elite. They are

forms of action which exploit, directly or indirectly, one of the weak points of the

oppressed: their basic insecurity. The oppressed are insecure in their duality as

beings which ‘house’ the oppressor. On the one hand, they resist him; on the other

hand, at a certain stage in their relationship, they are attracted by him. Under these

circumstances, the oppressors easily obtain positive results from divisive action.

In addition, the oppressed know from experience the price of not accepting an

invitation offered with the purpose of preventing their unity as a class: losing their

jobs and finding their names on a ‘black list’ signifying closed doors to other jobs

is the least that can happen. Their basic insecurity is thus directly linked to the

enslavement of their labour (which really implies the enslavement of their person,

as Bishop Spilt emphasized).

Men are fulfilled only to the extent that they create their world (which is a

human world), and create it with their transforming labour. The fulfilment of men

as men lies, then, in the fulfilment of the world. If for men to be in the world of

work is to be totally dependent, insecure, and permanently threatened - if their

work does not belong to them - men cannot be fulfilled. Work which is not free

ceases to be a fulfilling pursuit and becomes an effective means of

dehumanization.

Every move by the oppressed towards unity points towards other actions; it

means that sooner or later the oppressed will perceive their state of

depersonalization and discover that as long as they are divided they will always be

easy prey for manipulation and domination. Unity and organization can enable

them to change their weakness into a transforming force with which they can re-

create the world, making it more human. The more human world to which they

justly aspire, however, is the antithesis of the ‘human world’ of the oppressors - a

world which is the exclusive possession of the oppressors, who preach an

impossible harmony between themselves (who dehumanize) and the oppressed

(who are dehumanized). Since oppressors and oppressed are antithetical, what

serves the interests of one group is opposed to the interests of the other.

Dividing in order to preserve the status quo, then, is neces-sarily a fundamental

objective of the theory of anti-dialogical action. In addition, the dominators try to

present themselves as saviours of the men they dehumanize and divide. This

messianism, however, cannot conceal their true intention: to save them-selves.

They want to save their riches, their power, their way of life: the things that enable

them to subjugate others. Their mis-take is that men cannot save themselves (no

matter how one understands ‘salvation’), either as individuals or as an oppres-sor

class. Salvation can be achieved only with others. To the extent, however, that the

elites oppress, they cannot be with the oppressed; for being against them is the

essence of oppression.

A psychoanalysis of oppressive action might reveal the ‘false generosity’ of the

oppressor (described in chapter 1) as a dimension of the latter’s sense of guilt.

With this false generosity, he attempts not only to preserve an unjust and

necrophilic order, but to ‘buy’ peace for himself. It happens that peace cannot be

bought; peace is experienced in solidarity and loving acts, which cannot be

incarnated in oppression. Hence, the messianic element in the theory of anti-

dialogical action reinforces the first characteristic of this action: the necessity for

conquest.

Since it is necessary to divide the people in order to preserve the status quo and,

thereby, the power of the dominators, it is essential for the oppressors to keep the

oppressed from per-ceiving their strategy. So the former must convince the latter

that they are being ‘defended* against the demonic action of ‘marginal, rowdies

and enemies of God’ (for these are the epithets directed at men who lived and are

living the brave pursuit of man’s humanization). In order to divide and confuse the

people, the destroyers call themselves builders, and accuse the true builders of

being destructive. History, however, always takes it upon itself to modify these

designations. Today, although the official terminology continues to call Tiradentes

a conspirator (‘Inconfidente’) and the libertarian movement which he led a

conspiracy (‘Inconfidencia’), the national hero is not the man who called

Tiradentes a ‘bandit’, ordered him hanged and quartered, and had pieces of the

bloody corpse strewn through the streets of the neighbouring villages as an

example. Tiradentes is the hero. History tore up the ‘title’ given him by the elites,

and recognized his action for what it was. It is the men who in their own time

sought unity for liberation who are the heroes - not those who used their power to

divide and rule.

Manipulation

Manipulation is another dimension of the theory of anti-dialogical action, and,

like the strategy of division, is an instru-ment of conquest: the objective around

which all the dimensions of the theory revolve. By means of manipulation, the

dominant elites try to make the masses conform to their objectives. And the greater

the political immaturity of these people (rural or urban) the more easily they can be

manipulated by those who do not wish to lose their power.

The people are manipulated by the series of myths described earlier in this

chapter, and by yet another myth: the model of itself the bourgeoisie presents to the

people which spells out possibility for their own ascent. In order for these myths to

function, however, the people must accept the word of the bourgeoisie.

Within certain historical conditions, manipulation is accomplished by means of

pacts between the dominant and the dominated classes - pacts which, if considered

superficially, might give the impression of a dialogue between the classes. In

reality, however, these pacts are not dialogue, because their true objectives are

determined by the unequivocal interest of the dominant elites. In the last analysis,

pacts are used by the dominators to achieve their own ends. The support given by

the people to the so-called ‘national bourgeoisie’ in defence of so-called ‘national-

capitalism’ is an example in point. Sooner or later, these pacts always increase the

subjugation of the people. They are proposed only when the people begin (even

naively) to emerge from this historical process and by this emergence to threaten

the dominant elites. The presence of the people in the historical process, no longer

as mere spectators, but with the first signs of aggressiveness, is sufficiently

disquieting to frighten the dominant elites into doubling the tactics of

manipulation.

In this historical phase, manipulation becomes a fundamental instrument for the

preservation of domination. Prior to the emergence of the people there is no

manipulation (precisely speaking), but rather total suppression. When the

oppressed are almost completely submerged in reality, it is unnecessary to

manipulate them. In the anti-dialogical theory of action, mani-pulation is the

response of the oppressor to the new concrete conditions of the historical process.

Through manipulation, the dominant elites can lead the people into an unauthentic

type of ‘organization’, and can thus avoid the threatening alternative: the true

organization of the emerged and emerging people.

The latter have only two possibilities as they enter the historical process: either

they must organize authentically for their liberation, or they will be manipulated by

the elites. Authentic organization is obviously not going to be stimulated by the

dominators; it is the task of the revolutionary leaders.

It happens, however, that large sectors of the oppressed form an urban

proletariat, especially in the more industrialized centres of the country, Although

these sectors are occasionally restive, they lack revolutionary consciousness and

consider themselves privileged. Manipulation, with its series of deceits and

promises, usually finds fertile ground here.

The antidote to manipulation lies in a critically conscious revolutionary

organization, which will pose as problems to the people their position in the

historical process, the national reality, and manipulation itself. In the words of

Francisco Weffert:

All the policies of the Left are based on the masses and depend on the

consciousness of the latter. If that consciousness is confused, the Left will lose its

roots and certain downfall will be imminent, although (as in the Brazilian case) the

Left may be deluded into thinking it can achieve the revolution by means of a

quick return to power. In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always

tempted by a ‘quick return to power’, forgetting the necessity of joining with the

oppressed to forge an organization, and thus straying into an impossible ‘dialogue’

with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not

infrequently itself falls into an elitist game, which it calls ‘realism’.

Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to

anaesthetize the people so they will not think. For if the people join to their

presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of

their emergence materializes in revolution. Whether one calls this correct thinking

‘revolutionary consciousness’ or ‘class consciousness’, it is an indispensable

precondition of revolution. The dominant elites are so well aware of this fact that

they instinctively use all means, including physical violence, to keep the people

from thinking. They have a shrewd intuition of the ability of dialogue to develop a

capacity for criticism. While some revolutionary leaders consider dialogue with the

people a ‘bourgeois and ‘reactionary’ activity, the bourgeoisie regard dialogue

between the oppressed and the revolutionary leaders as a very real danger to be

avoided.

One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individ-uals with the

bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried

out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders. As

Weffert points out, these leaders serve as intermediaries between the oligarchic

elites and the people. The emergence of populism as a style of political action thus

coincides causally with the emergence of the oppressed. The populist leader who

rises from this process is an ambiguous being, an ‘amphibian’ who lives in two

elements. Shuttling back and forth between the people and the dominant

oligarchies, he bears the marks of both groups.

Since the populist leader simply manipulates, instead of fighting for authentic

popular organization, this type of leader serves the revolution little if at all. Only

by abandoning his ambiguous character and dual action and by opting decisively

for the people (thus ceasing to be populist) does he renounce manipulation and

dedicate himself to the revolutionary task of organization. At this point he ceases

to be an intermediary between the people and the elites, and becomes a

contradiction of the latter; thereupon the elites immediately join forces to curb him.

Observe the dramatic and finally unequivocal terms in which Getulio Vargas”

spoke to the workers at a 1 May celebration during his last period as head of state:

I want to tell you that the gigantic work of renewal which my Administration is

beginning to carry out cannot be completed successfully without the support and

the daily, steadfast cooperation of the workers.

Vargas then spoke of his first ninety days in office, which he called ‘an estimate

of the difficulties and obstacles which, here and there, are being raised in

opposition to the actions of the government’. He spoke directly to the people about

how deeply he felt ‘the helplessness, poverty, the high cost of living, low salaries...

the hopelessness of the unfortunate and the demands of the majority who live in

hope of better days’.

His appeal to the workers, in the same speech, then took on more objective

tones:

I have come to say that at this moment the Administration does not yet have the

laws or the concrete instruments for immediate action to defend the people’s

economy. It is thus necessary for the people to organize - not only to defend their

own interests, but also to give the government the base of support it requires to

carry out its objectives ... I need your unity. I need you, in solidarity, to organize

yourselves in unions. I need you to form a strong and cohesive bloc to stand beside

the government so that it will have all the force it needs to solve your problems. I

need your unity so you can fight against saboteurs, so you do not fall prey to the

interests of speculators and rapacious scoundrels in detriment of the interests of

the people.... The hour has come to appeal to the workers; unite in your unions as

free and organized forces ... at the present time no administration can survive or

dispose of sufficient force to achieve its social ends if it does not have the support

of the labouring organizations.

In sum, Vargas in this speech appealed vehemently to the people to organize and

to unite in defence of their rights; and he told them, as Chief of State, of the

obstacles, the hindrances, and the innumerable difficulties involved in governing

with them. From that moment on his administration encountered increasing

difficulties, until the tragic climax of August 1954. If Vargas had not in his last

term shown such open encouragement to the organization of the people,

subsequently linked to a series of measures in defence of the national interest,

possibly the reactionary elites would not have taken the extreme measures they did.

Any populist leader who moves (even discreetly) towards the people in any way

other than as the intermediary of the oligarchies will be curbed by the latter - if

they have sufficient force to stop him. But as long as the leader restricts himself to

pater-nalism and social welfare activities, although there may be occasional

divergences between him and groups of oligarchies whose interests have been

touched, deep differences are rare. This is because welfare programmes as

instruments of manipulation ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an

anaesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and

from the concrete solutions of these problems. They splinter the oppressed into

groups of individuals hoping to get a few more benefits for themselves. This

situation contains, however, a positive element: the individuals who receive some

aid always want more; those who do not receive aid, seeing the example of those

who do, grow envious and also want assistance. Since the dominant elites cannot

‘aid’ everyone, they end by increasing the restiveness of the oppressed.

The revolutionary leaders should take advantage of the contradictions of

manipulation by posing it as a problem to the oppressed, with the objective of

organizing them.

Cultural invasion

The theory of anti-dialogical action has one last fundamental characteristic:

cultural invasion, which like divisive tactics and manipulation also serves the ends

of conquest. In this phenomenon, the invaders penetrate the cultural context of

another group, and ignoring the potential of the latter, they impose their own view

of the world upon those they invade and inhibit the creativity of the invaded by

curbing their expression.

Whether urbane or harsh, cultural invasion is thus always an act of violence

against the persons of the invaded culture, who lose their originality or face the

threat of losing it. In cultural invasion (as in all the modalities of anti-dialogical

action) the invaders are the authors of, and actors in, the process; those they invade

are the objects. The invaders mould; those they invade are moulded. The invaders

choose; those they invade follow that choice - or are expected to follow it. The

invaders act; those they invade have only the illusion of acting, through the action

of the invaders.

All domination involves invasion - at times physical and overt, at times

camouflaged, with the invader assuming the role of a helping friend. In the last

analysis, invasion is a form of economic and cultural domination. Invasion may be

practised by a metropolitan society upon a dependent society, or it may be implicit

in the domination of one class over another within the same society.

Cultural conquest leads to the cultural inauthenticity of those who are invaded;

they begin to respond to the values, the standards, and the goals of the invaders. In

their passion to dominate, to mould others to their patterns and their way of life,

the invaders desire to know how those they have invaded apprehend reality - but

only so that they can dominate the latter more effectively. In cultural invasion it is

essential that those who are invaded come to see their reality with the outlook of

the invaders rather than their own; for the more they mimic the invaders, the more

stable the position of the latter becomes.

For cultural invasion to succeed, it is essential that those invaded become

convinced of their intrinsic inferiority. Since everything has its opposite, if those

who are invaded consider themselves inferior, they must necessarily recognize the

super-iority of the invaders. The values of the latter thereby become the pattern for

the former. The more invasion is accentuated and those invaded are alienated from

the spirit of their own culture and from themselves, the more the latter want to be

like the invaders: to walk like them, dress like them, talk like them.

The social ‘I’ of the invaded person, like every social ‘I’, is formed in the socio-

cultural relations of the social structure, and therefore reflects the duality of the

invaded culture. This duality (which was described earlier) explains why invaded

and domin-ated individuals, at a certain moment of their existential experience,

almost ‘adhere’ to the oppressor ‘Thou’. The oppressed ‘I’ must break with this

near adhesion to the oppressor ‘Thou’, drawing away from the latter in order to see

him more objectively, at which point he critically recognizes himself to be in

contradiction with the oppressor. In so doing, he ‘considers’ as a dehumanizing

reality the structure in which he is being oppressed. This qualitative change in the

perception of the world can only be achieved in the praxis.

Cultural invasion is on the one hand an instrument of dom-ination, and on the

other, the result of domination. Thus, cul-tural action of a dominating character

(like other forms of anti-dialogical action), in addition to being deliberate and

planned, is in another sense simply a product of oppressive reality.

For example, a rigid and oppressive social structure neces-sarily influences the

institutions of child rearing and education within that structure. These institutions

pattern their action after the style of the structure, and transmit the myths of the

latter. Homes and schools (from nurseries to universities) exist not in the abstract,

but in time and space. Within the structures of domination they function largely as

agencies which prepare the invaders of the future.

The parent-child relationship in the home usually reflects the objective cultural

conditions of the surrounding social struc-ture. If the conditions which penetrate

the home are authoritarian, rigid, and dominating, the home will increase the

climate of oppression. As these authoritarian relations between parents and

children intensify,” children in their infancy increasingly internalize the paternal

authority.

Presenting (with his customary clarity) the problem of necrophilia and biophilia,

Fromm analyses the objective con-ditions which generate each condition, whether

in the home (parent-child relations in a climate of indifference and oppres-sion or

of love and freedom), or in a socio-cultural context. If children reared in an

atmosphere of lovelessness and oppression, children whose potency has been

frustrated, do not manage during their youth to take the path of authentic rebellion,

they will either drift into total indifference, alienated from reality by the authorities

and the myths the fatter have used to ‘shape’ them; or they may engage in forms of

destructive action.

The home atmosphere is continued in the school, where the students soon

discover (as in the home) that in order to achieve some satisfaction they must adapt

to the precepts which have been set from above. One of these precepts is not to

think.

Internalizing parental authority through the rigid relationship structure

emphasized by the school, these young people tend when they become

professionals (because of the very fear of freedom instilled by these relationships)

to repeat the rigid patterns in which they were miseducated. This phenomenon, in

addition to their class position, perhaps explains why so many professionals adhere

to anti-dialogical action. Whatever the specialty that brings them into contact with

the people, they are almost unshakeably convinced that it is their mission to ‘give’

the latter their knowledge and techniques. They see themselves as ‘promoters’ of

the people. Their programmes of action (which might have been prescribed by any

good theorist of oppressive action) include their own objectives, their own

con-victions, and their own preoccupations. They do not listen to the people, but

instead plan to teach them how to ‘cast off the laziness which creates

underdevelopment’. To these profes-sionals, it seems absurd to consider the

necessity of respecting the ‘view of the world’ held by the people. The

professionals are the ones with a ‘world view’. They regard as equally absurd the

affirmation that one must necessarily consult the people when organizing the

programme content of educational action. They feel that the ignorance of the

people is so complete that they are unfit for anything except to receive the

teachings of the professionals.

When, however, at a certain point of their existential experience, those who have

been invaded begin in one way or another to reject this invasion (to which they

might earlier have adapted), the professionals, in order to justify their failure, say

that the members of the invaded group are ‘inferior’ because they are ‘ingrates’,

‘shiftless’, ‘diseased’, or of ‘mixed blood’.

Well-intentioned professionals (those who use ‘invasion’ not as deliberate

ideology but as the expression of their own up-bringing) eventually discover that

certain of their educational failures must be ascribed, not to the intrinsic inferiority

of the ‘simple men of the people’, but to the violence of their own act of invasion.

Those who make this discovery face a difficult alternative: they feel the need to

renounce invasion, but patterns of domination are so entrenched within them that

this renunciation would become a threat to their own identities. To renounce

invasion would mean ending their dual status as dominated and dominators. It

would mean abandoning all the myths which nourish invasion, and starting to

incarnate dialogical action. For this very reason, it would mean to cease being over

or inside (as foreigners) in order to be with (as comrades). And so the fear of

freedom takes hold of these men. During this traumatic process, they naturally tend

to rationalize their fear with a series of evasions.

The fear of freedom is greater still in professionals who have not yet discovered

for themselves the invasive nature of their action, and who are told that their action

is dehumanizing. Not infrequently, especially at the point of decoding concrete

situa-tions, participants in our training course ask the coordinator in an irritated

manner: ‘Where do you think you’re steering us, anyway?’ The coordinator isn’t

trying to ‘steer’ them anywhere; it is just that in facing a concrete situation as a

problem, the participants begin to realize that if their analysis of the situation goes

any deeper they will either have to divest them-selves of their myths, or reaffirm

them. Divesting themselves of and renouncing their myths represents, at that

moment, an act of self-violence. On the other hand, to reaffirm those myths is to

reveal themselves. As I explain in Introduction a la Action Cultural, the only way

out (which functions as a defence mech-anism) is to project onto the coordinator

their own usual practices: steering, conquering, and invading.

This same retreat occurs, though on a smaller scale, among men of the people

who have been ground down by the concrete situation of oppression and

domesticated by charity. One of the teachers of Full Circle, which carried out a

valuable edu-cational programme in New York City under the coordination of

Robert Fox, relates the following incident. A group in a New York ghetto was

presented a coded situation showing a big pile of garbage on a street corner - the

very same street where the group was meeting. One of the participants said at once,

‘I see a street in Africa or Latin America.’ ‘And why not in New York?’ asked the

teacher. ‘Because we are the United States and that can’t happen here.’ Beyond a

doubt this man and some of his comrades who agreed with him were retreating

from a reality so offensive to them that even to acknowledge that reality was

threatening. For an alienated person, conditioned by a culture of achievement and

personal success, to recognize his situation as objectively unfavourable seems to

hinder his own possibilities of success.

In the case cited, and in that of the professionals, the deter-mining force of the

culture which develops the myths .men subsequently internalize is evident. In both

cases, the culture of the dominant class hinders the affirmation of men as beings of

decision. Neither the professionals nor the discussion participants in the New York

slums talk and act for themselves as active Subjects of this historical process. None

of them are theoreticians or ideologues of domination. On the contrary, they are

effects which in turn become causes of domination. This is one of the most serious

problems the revolution must confront when it reaches power. This stage demands

maximum political wisdom, decision, and courage from the leaders, who for this

very reason must have sufficient judgement not to fall into irrationally sectarian

positions.

Professional men of any discipline, university graduates or not, are men who

have been ‘determined from above’ by a culture of domination which has

constituted them as dual beings. (If they had come from the lower classes this

miseducation would be the same, if not worse.) These professionals, however, are

necessary to the reorganization of the new society. And since many among them -

even though ‘afraid of freedom’ and reluctant to engage in humanizing action - are

in truth more misguided than anything else, they not only could be, but ought to be,

reclaimed by the revolution.

This reclamation requires that the revolutionary leaders, progressing from what

was previously dialogical cultural action, initiate the ‘cultural revolution’. At this

point, revolutionary power moves beyond its role as a necessary obstacle

confronting those who wish to negate men, and assumes a new and bolder position,

with a clear invitation to all who wish to participate in the reconstruction of

society. In this sense, ‘cultural revolution’ is a necessary continuation of the

dialogical cultural action which must be carried out before the revolution reaches

power.

‘Cultural revolution’ takes the total society to be reconstructed, including all

human activities, as the object of its remoulding action. Society cannot be

reconstructed in a mechanistic fashion; the culture which is culturally re-created

through revolution is the fundamental instrument for this reconstruction. ‘Cultural

revolution’ is the revolutionary regime’s maximum effort at conscientization - it

should reach everyone, regardless of his task.

Consequently, this effort at conscientization cannot rest content with the

technical or scientific training of intended specialists. The new society becomes

qualitatively distinct from the old in more than a partial way. Revolutionary society

cannot attribute to technology the same ends attributed by the previous society;

accordingly, the training of men in the two societies must also differ. Technical

and scientific training need not be inimical to humanistic education as long as

science and technology in the revolutionary society are at the service of permanent

liberation, of humanization.

From this point of view, the training of men for any occupa-tion (since all

occupations occur in time and space) requires the understanding of, firstly, culture

as a superstructure which can maintain ‘remnants’ of the past, as Althusser puts it,

alive in the substructure undergoing revolutionary transformation and, secondly,

the occupation itself as an instrument for the transformation of culture. As the

Cultural Revolution deepens conscientization in the creative praxis of the new

society, men will begin to perceive why mythical remnants of the old society

survive in the new. And men will then be able to free themselves more rapidly of

these spectres, which by hindering the edifica-tion of a new society have always

constituted a serious problem for every revolution. Through these cultural

remnants the oppressor society continues to invade - this time invading the

revolutionary society itself.

This invasion is especially terrible because it is carried out not by the dominant

elite reorganized as such, but by men who have participated in the revolution. As

men who ‘house’ the oppressor, they resist as might the latter themselves the

further basic steps which the revolution must take. And as dual beings they also

accept (still due to the remnants of old feeling) power which becomes

bureaucratized and which violently represses them. In turn, this violently

repressive bureaucratic power can be explained by what Althusser calls the

‘reactivation of old elements’ in the new society each time special circumstances

permit.

For all the above reasons, I interpret the revolutionary process as dialogical

cultural action which is prolonged in ‘cultural revolution’ once power is taken. In

both stages a serious and profound effort at conscientization is necessary. It is the

neces-sary means by which men, through a true praxis, leave behind the status of

objects to assume the status of historical Subjects.

Finally, Cultural Revolution develops the practice of permanent dialogue

between leaders and people, and consolidates the participation of the people in

power. In this way, as both leaders and people continue their critical activity, the

revolution will more easily be able to defend itself against bureaucratic tendencies

(which lead to new forms of oppression) and against ‘invasion’ (which is always

the same). The invader – whether in a bourgeois or in a revolutionary society - may

be an agronomist or a sociologist, an economist or a public health engineer, a priest

or a pastor, an educator or a social worker - or a revolutionary.

Cultural invasion, which serves the ends of conquest and the preservation of

oppression, always involves a parochial view of reality, a static perception of the

world, and the imposition of one world view upon another. It implies the

‘superiority’ of the invader and the ‘inferiority’ of those who are invaded, as well

as the imposition of values by the former, who possess the latter and are afraid of

losing them.

Cultural invasion further signifies that the ultimate seat of decision regarding the

action of those who are invaded lies not with them but with the invaders. And

when the power of decision is located outside rather than within the one who

should decide, the latter has only the illusion of deciding. This is why there can be

no socio-economic development in a dual, ‘reflex’, invaded society. For

development to occur it is necessary: firstly that there be a movement of search and

creativity having its seat of decision in the searcher; secondly that this movement

occur not only in space, but in the existential time of the conscious searcher.

Thus, while all development is transformation, not all trans-formation is

development. The transformation occurring in a seed which under favourable

conditions germinates and sprouts is not development. In the same way, the

transformation of an animal is not development. The transformations of seeds and

animals are determined by the species to which they belong; and they occur in a

time which does not belong to them, for time belongs to men.

Men, among the uncompleted beings, are the only ones which develop. As

historical, autobiographical, ‘beings for themselves’, their transformation

(development) occur in their own existential time, never outside it. Men who are

submitted to concrete conditions of oppression in which they become alien-ated

‘beings for another* of the false ‘being for himself’ on whom they depend, are not

able to develop authentically. Deprived of their own power of decision, which is

located in the oppressor, they follow the prescriptions of the latter. The oppressed

only begin to develop when, surmounting the con-tradiction in which they are

caught, they become ‘beings for themselves’.

If we consider society as a being, it is obvious that only a society which is a

‘being for itself can develop. Societies which are dual, ‘reflex’, invaded, and

dependent on the metropolitan society cannot develop because they are alienated;

their political, economic, and cultural decision-making power is located outside

themselves, in the invader society. In the last analysis, the latter determines the

destiny of the former: mere transformation; for it is their transformation - not their

development - that is in the interest of the metropolitan society.

It is essential not to confuse modernization with develop-ment. The former,

although it may affect certain groups in the ‘satellite society’, is almost always

induced; and it is the metropolitan society which derives the true benefits there

from. A society which is merely modernized without developing will continue -

even if it takes over some minimal delegated powers of decision to depend on the

outside country. This is the fate of any dependent society, as long as it remains

dependent.

In order to determine whether or not a society is developing, one must go

beyond criteria based on indices of per capita income (which, expressed in

statistical form, are misleading) as well as those which concentrate on the study of

gross income. The basic, elementary criterion is whether or not the society is a

‘being for itself. If it is not, the other criteria indicate modernization rather than

development.

The principal contradiction of dual societies is the relation-ship of dependency

between them and the metropolitan society. Once the contradiction has been

superseded, the transformation hitherto effected through ‘aid’, which has primarily

benefited the metropolitan society, becomes true development, which benefits the

‘being for itself.

For the above reasons, the purely reformist solutions at-tempted by these

societies (even though some of the reforms may frighten and even panic the more

reactionary members of the elite groups) do not resolve their external and internal

con-tradictions. Almost always the metropolitan society induces these reformist

solutions in response to the demands of the historical process, as a new way of

preserving its hegemony. It is as if the metropolitan society were saying: ‘Let us

carry out reforms before the people carry out a revolution.’ And in order to achieve

this goal, the metropolitan society has no options other than conquest,

manipulation, economic and cul-tural (and sometimes military) invasion of the

dependent society-an invasion in which the elite leaders of the dominated society

to a large extent act as mere brokers for the leaders of the metropolitan society.

To close this tentative analysis of the theory of anti-dialogical action, I wish to

reaffirm that revolutionary leaders must not use the same anti-dialogical

procedures used by the oppressors; on the contrary, revolutionary leaders must

follow the path of dialogue and of communication.

Before proceeding to analyse the theory of dialogical action, it is essential to

discuss briefly how the revolutionary leadership group is formed, and some of the

historical and sociological consequences for the revolutionary process. Usually this

leader-ship group is made up of men who in one way or another have belonged to

the social strata of the dominators at a certain point in their existential experience,

under certain historical conditions, these men renounce the class to which they

belong and join the oppressed, in an act of true solidarity (or so one would hope).

Whether or not this adherence results from a scientific analysis of reality, it

represents (when authentic) an act of love and true commitment. Joining the

oppressed requires going to them and communicating with them. The people must

find themselves in the emerging leaders, and the latter must find themselves in the

people.

The leaders who have emerged necessarily reflect the contradiction of the

dominant elites communicated to them by the oppressed, who may not yet,

however, clearly perceive their own state of oppression or critically recognize their

relationship of antagonism to the oppressors. They may still be in the position

previously termed ‘adhesion’ to the oppressor. On the other hand, it is possible that

due to certain objective historical conditions they have already reached a relatively

clear percep-tion of their state of oppression.

In the first case, the adhesion - or partial adhesion - of the people to the

oppressor makes it impossible for them (to repeat Fanon’s point) to locate him

outside themselves. In the second case, they can locate the oppressor and can thus

critically recognize their relationship of antagonism to him.

In the first case, the oppressor is ‘housed’ within the people, and their resulting

ambiguity makes them fearful of freedom. They resort (stimulated by the

oppressor) to magical explanations or a false view of God, to whom they

fatalistically transfer the responsibility for their oppressed state. It is extremely

unlikely that these self-mistrustful, downtrodden, hopeless people will seek their

own liberation-an act of rebellion which they may view as a disobedient violation

of the will of God, as an unwarranted confrontation with destiny. (Hence the oft-

emphasized necessity of posing as problems the myths fed to the people by the

oppressors.) In the second case, when the people have reached a relatively clear

picture of oppression which leads them to localize the oppressor outside

themselves, they take up the struggle to surmount the contradiction in which they

are caught. At this moment they overcome the distance between ‘class necessity’

and ‘class consciousness’.

In the first case, the revolutionary leaders unfortunately and involuntarily

become the contradiction of the people. In the second case, the emerging leaders

receive from the people sympathetic and almost instantaneous support, which tends

to increase during the process of revolutionary action. The leaders go to the people

in a spontaneously dialogical manner. There is an almost immediate empathy

between the people and the revolutionary leaders: their mutual commitment is

almost instantly sealed. In fellowship, they consider themselves co-equal

contradictions of the dominant elites. From this point on the established practice of

dialogue between people and leaders, is nearly unshakeable. That dialogue will

continue when power is reached; and the people will know that they have come to

power.

This sharing in no way diminishes the spirit of struggle, courage, capacity for

love, or daring required of the revolutionary leaders. Fidel Castro and his comrades

(whom many at the time termed ‘irresponsible adventurers’), an eminently

dialogi-cal leadership group, identified with the people who endured the brutal

violence of the Batista dictatorship. This adherence was not easy; it required

bravery on the part of the leaders to; love the people sufficiently to be willing to

sacrifice themselves for them. It required courageous witness by the leaders to

recommence after each disaster, moved by undying hope in a future victory which

(because fogged together with the people) would belong not to the leaders alone,

but to the leaders and the people - or to the people, including the leaders.

Fidel gradually polarized the adherence of the Cuban people, who due to their

historical experience had already begun to break their adhesion to the oppressor.

This ‘drawing away’ from the oppressor led the people to objectify him, and to see

themselves as his contradiction. So it was that Fidel never entered into

contradiction with the people. (The occasional desertions or betrayals registered by

Guevara in his Relate de la Guerra Revolucionaria - in which he also refers to the

many who adhered - were to be expected.)

Thus, due to certain historical conditions, the movement by the revolutionary

leaders to the people is either horizontal - so that leaders and people form one body

in contradiction to the oppressor - or it is triangular, with the revolutionary leaders

occupying the vertex of the triangle in contradiction to the, oppressors and to the

oppressed as well. As we have seen, the latter situation is forced on the leaders

when the people have not yet achieved a critical perception of oppressive reality.

Almost never, however, does a revolutionary leadership group perceive that it

constitutes a contradiction to the people. Indeed, this perception is painful, and the

resistance may serve as a defence mechanism. After all, it is not easy for leaders

who have emerged through adherence to the oppressed to recognize themselves as

being in contradiction to those to whom they adhered. It is important to recognize

this reluctance when analysing certain forms of behaviour on the part of

revolutionary leaders who involuntarily become a contradiction (although not

antagonists) of the people.

In order to carry out the revolution, revolutionary leaders undoubtedly require

the adherence of the people. When leaders who constitute a contradiction to the

people seek this adherence, and find rather certain aloofness and mistrust, they

often regard this reaction as indicating an inherent defect on the part of the people.

They interpret a certain historical moment of the people’s consciousness as

evidence of their intrinsic deficiency. Since the leaders need the adherence of the

people so that the revolution can be achieved (but at the same time mistrust the

mistrustful people), they are tempted to utilize the same procedures used by the

dominant elites to oppress. Rationalizing their lack of confidence in the people, the

leaders say that it is impossible to dialogue with the people before taking power,

thus opting for the anti-dialogical theory of action. Thence-forward just like the

dominant elites - they try to conquer the people: they become messianic; they use

manipulation and carry out cultural invasion. By advancing along these paths, the

paths of oppression, they will not achieve revolution; or if they do, it will not be

authentic revolution.

The role of revolutionary leadership (under any circumstances, but especially so

in those described) is to consider seriously, even as they act, the reasons for any

attitude of mistrust on the part of the people, and to seek out true avenues of

communion with them, ways of helping the people to help themselves critically

perceive the reality which oppresses them.

The dominated consciousness is dual, ambiguous, and full of fear and mistrust.

In his Diary about the struggle in Bolivia, Guevara refers several times to the lack

of peasant participation:

The peasant mobilization does not exist, except for informative duties which

annoy us somewhat. They are neither very rapid nor very efficient; they can be

neutralized. ... Complete lack of incorporation of the peasants, although they are

losing their fear of us and we are succeeding in winning their admiration. It is a

slow and patient task.

The internalization of the oppressor by the dominated consciousness of the

peasants explains their fear and their inefficiency.

The behaviour and reactions of the oppressed, which lead the oppressor to

practise cultural invasion, should evoke from the revolutionary a different theory

of action. What distinguished revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not

only their objectives, but their procedures. If they act in the same way, the

objectives become identical. It is as self-contradictory for the dominant elites to

pose men-world relations as problems to the people as it is for the revolutionary

leaders not to do so.

Let us now analyse the theory of dialogical cultural action and attempt to

apprehend its constituent elements.

Cooperation

In the theory of anti-dialogical action, conquest (as its primary characteristic)

involves a Subject who conquers another person and ‘transforms him into a ‘thing’.

In the dialogical theory of action, Subjects meet in cooperation in order to

transform the world. The anti-dialogical, dominating ‘I’ transforms the domin-ated,

conquered ‘thou’ into a mere ‘it’ in Martin Buber’s phraseology. The dialogical T,

however, knows that it is precisely the ‘thou’ (‘not I’) which has called forth his

own existence. He also knows that the ‘thou’ which calls forth his own existence in

turn constitutes an ‘I’ which has in his ‘I’ its ‘thou’. The ‘I’ and the ‘thou’ thus

become, in the dialectic of these relationships, two’ thous’ which become two’ Is’.

The dialogical theory of action does not involve a Subject, who dominates by

virtue of conquest, and a dominated object. Instead, there are Subjects who meet to

name the world in order to transform it. If at a certain historical moment the

oppressed, for the reasons previously described, are unable to fulfil their vocation

as Subjects, the posing of their very oppression as a problem (which always

involves some form of action) will help them achieve this vocation.

The above does not mean that in the dialogical task there is no role for

revolutionary leadership. It means merely that the leaders - in spite of their

important, fundamental and indispensable role - do not own the people and have no

right to steer the people blindly towards their salvation. Such a salvation would be

a mere gift from the leaders to the people - a breaking of the dialogical bond

between them, and a reducing of the people from co-authors of liberating action

into the objects of this action.

Cooperation, as a characteristic of dialogical action - which occurs only among

Subjects (who may, however, have diverse levels of functions and thus of

responsibility) - can only be achieved through communication. Dialogue, as

essential com-munication, must underlie any cooperation. In the theory of

dialogical action, there is no place for conquering the people on behalf of the

revolutionary cause, but only for gaining their adherence. Dialogue does not

impose, does not manipulate, does not domesticate, does not ‘sloganize’. This does

not mean, however, that the theory of dialogical action leads nowhere; nor does it

mean that the dialogical man does not have a clear idea of what he wants, or of the

objectives to which he is committed.

The commitment of the revolutionary leaders to the oppressed is at the same

time a commitment to freedom. And because of that commitment, the leaders

cannot attempt to conquer the oppressed, but must gain their adherence to

liberation. Conquered adherence is not adherence; it is ‘adhesion’ of the

vanquished to the conqueror, who prescribes the options open to the former.

Authentic adherence is the free coincidence of choices; it cannot occur apart from

communication among men, mediated by reality.

Thus cooperation leads dialogical Subjects to focus their attention on the reality

which mediates them and which - posed as a problem - challenges them. The

response to that challenge is the action of dialogical Subjects upon reality in order

to transform it. Let me re-emphasize that posing reality as a problem does not

mean sloganizing: it means critical analysis of a problematic reality.

As opposed to the mythicizing practices of the dominant elites, dialogical theory

requires that the world be unveiled. No one can, however, unveil the world for

another. Although one Subject may initiate the unveiling on behalf of others, the

others must also become Subjects of this act. The adherence of the people is made

possible by this unveiling of the world and of themselves, in authentic praxis.

This adherence coincides with the trust the people begin to place in themselves

and in the revolutionary leaders, as the former perceive the dedication and

authenticity of the latter. The trust of the people in the leaders reflects the

confidence of the leaders in the people.

This confidence should not, however, be naive. The leaders must believe in the

potentialities of the people, whom they cannot treat as mere objects of their own

action; they must believe that the people are capable of participating in the pur-suit

of liberation. But they must always mistrust the ambiguity of oppressed men,

mistrust the oppressor ‘housed’ in the latter. Accordingly, when Guevara exhorts

the revolutionary to be always mistrustful he is not disregarding the fundamental

condition of the theory of dialogical action. He is merely being a realist.

Although trust is basic to dialogue, it is not an a priori condition of the latter: it

results from the encounter in which men are co-Subjects in denouncing the world,

as part of the world’s transformation. But as long as the oppressor ‘within* the

oppressed is stronger than they themselves are, their natural fear of freedom may

lead them to denounce the revolutionary leaders instead! The leaders cannot be

credulous, but must be alert for these possibilities. Guevara’s Episodes confirms

these risks: not only desertions, but even betrayal of the cause. At times in this

document, while recognizing the necessity of punishing the deserter in order to

preserve the cohesion and dis-cipline of the group, Guevara also recognizes certain

factors which explain the desertion. One of them, perhaps the most important, is

the deserter’s ambivalence.

Another portion of Guevara’s document, which refers to his presence (not only

as a guerrilla but as a medical doctor) in a peasant community in the Sierra Maestra

and relates to our discussion of cooperation, is quite striking:

As a result of daily contact with these people and their problems we became

firmly convinced of the need for a complete change in the life of our people. The

idea of an agrarian reform became crystal clear. Communion with the people,

ceasing to be a mere theory, became an integral part of ourselves.

Guerrillas and peasants began to merge into a solid mass. No one can say

exactly when, in this long process, the ideas became reality and we became apart

of the peasantry. As far as 1 am concerned, the contact with my patients in the

Sierra turned a spontaneous and some-what lyrical decision into a more serene

force, one of an entirely differ-ent value Those poor, suffering, loyal inhabitants of

the Sierra cannot even imagine what a great contribution they made ‘to the forging

of our revolutionary ideology.

Note Guevara’s emphasis that communion with the people was decisive for the

transformation of a’ spontaneous and somewhat lyrical decision into a more serene

force, one of an entirely different value’. It was, then, in dialogue with the peasants

that Guevara’s revolutionary praxis became definitive. What Guevara did not say,

perhaps due to humility, is that it was his own humility and capacity to love that

made possible his communion with the people. And this indisputably dialogical

communion became cooperation. Note that Guevara (who did not climb the Sierra

Maestra with Fidel and his comrades as a frustrated youth in search of adventure)

recognizes that his ‘communion with the people ceased to be a mere theory, to

become an integral part of [himself]’. He stresses how from the moment of that

communion the peasants became ‘forgers’ of his ‘guerrillas’ ‘revolutionary

ideology’.

Even Guevara’s unmistakable style of narrating his and his comrades’

experiences, of describing his contacts with the ‘poor, loyal’ peasants in almost

evangelical language, reveals this remarkable man’s deep capacity for love and

communication. Thence emerges the force of his ardent testimony to the work of

another loving man: Camilo Torres, ‘the guerrilla priest’.

Without the communion which engenders true cooperation, the Cuban people

would have been mere objects of the revolutionary activity of the men of the Sierra

Maestra, and as objects, their adherence would have been impossible. At the most,

there might have been ‘adhesion’, but that is a component of domination, not

revolution.

In dialogical theory, at no stage can revolutionary action forgo communion with

the people. Communion in turn elicits cooperation, which brings leaders and

people to the fusion described by Guevara. This fusion can exist only if

revolution-ary activity is really human, empathetic, loving, communicative, and

humble, in order to be liberating.

The revolution loves and creates life; and in order to create life it may be

obliged to prevent some men from circumscribing life. In addition to the life-death

cycle basic to nature, there is also an unnatural living death: life which is denied its

fullness.

It should not be necessary here to cite statistics to show how many Brazilians

(and Latin Americans in general) are living corpses, shadows of human beings,

hopeless men, women and children victimized by an endless invisible war in which

their remnants of life are devoured by tuberculosis, schistosomiasis, infant

diarrhoea ... by the myriad diseases of poverty (most of which, in the terminology

of the oppressors, are called ‘tropical diseases’).

Father Chenu in Temoignage Chretien makes the following comments regarding

possible reactions to situations as extreme as the above:

Many, both among the priests attending the Council and the informed laymen,

fear that in facing the needs and suffering of the world we may simply adopt an

emotional protest in favour of palliating the manifestations and symptoms of

poverty and injustice without going on to analyse the causes of the fatter to

denounce a regime which encompasses this injustice and engenders this poverty.

Unity for liberation

Whereas in the anti-dialogical theory of action the dominators are compelled by

necessity to divide the oppressed, the more easily to preserve the state of

oppression, in the dialogical theory the leaders must dedicate themselves to an

untiring effort for unity among the oppressed - and unity of the leaders with the

oppressed - in order to achieve liberation.

The difficulty is that this category of dialogical action (like the others) cannot

occur apart from the praxis. The praxis of oppression is easy (or at least not

difficult) for the dominant elite; it is not easy, however, for the revolutionary

leaders to carry out a liberating praxis. The former group can rely on using the

instruments of power; the latter group has this power directed against it. The

former can organize itself freely, and though it may undergo fortuitous and

momentary divisions, it unites rapidly in the face of any threat to its fundamental

interests. The latter cannot exist without the people, and this very condition

constitutes the first obstacle to its efforts at organization.

It would indeed be inconsistent of the dominant elite to allow the revolutionary

leaders to organize. The internal unity of the dominant elite, which reinforces and

organizes its power, requires that the people be divided; the unity of the

revolution-ary leaders only exists in the unity of the people among them-selves and

in turn with them. The unity of the elite derives from its antagonism with the

people; the unity of the revolutionary leadership group grows out of communion

with the (united) people. The concrete situation of oppression - which dualizes the

‘I’ of the oppressed person, thereby making him ambiguous, emotionally unstable,

and fearful of freedom - facilitates the divisive action of the dominator by

hindering the unifying action indispensable to liberation.

Further, domination is itself objectively divisive. It maintains the oppressed ‘I’

in a position of ‘adhesion’ to a reality which seems all-powerful and

overwhelming, and then alienates him by presenting mysterious forces to explain

this power. Part of the oppressed ‘I’ is located in the reality to which he ‘adheres’;

part is located outside himself, in the mysterious forces which he regards as

responsible for a reality about which he can do nothing. He is divided between an

identical past and present, and a future without hope. He is a person who does not

perceive himself as becoming; hence he cannot have a future to be built in unity

with others. But as he breaks his ‘adhesion’ and objecti-fies the reality from which

he starts to emerge, he begins to integrate himself as a Subject (an T) confronting

an object (reality). At this moment, sundering the false unity of his divid-ed self, he

becomes a true individual.

To divide the oppressed, an ideology of oppression is indis-pensable. In contrast,

achieving their unity requires a form of cultural action through which they come to

know the why and how of their adhesion to reality - it requires de-ideologizing.

Hence, the effort to unify the oppressed does not call for mere ideological

‘sloganizing’. The latter, by distorting the authentic relation between the Subject

and objective reality, also separates the cognitive, the affective, and the active

aspects of the total, indivisible personality.

The object of dialogical-libertarian action is not to ‘dislodge’ the oppressed from

a mythological reality in order to ‘bind’ them to another reality. On the contrary,

the object of dialogical action is to make it possible for the oppressed, by

perceiving their adhesion, to opt to transform an unjust reality.

Since the unity of the oppressed involves solidarity among them, regardless of

their exact status, this unity unquestionably requires class consciousness. However,

the submersion in reality which characterizes the peasants of Latin America means

that consciousness of being an oppressed class must be preceded (or at least

accompanied) by achieving consciousness of being oppressed individuals.

Proposing as a problem, to a European peasant, the fact that he is a person might

strike him as strange. This is not true of Latin-American peasants, whose world

usually ends at the boundaries of the latifundium, whose gestures to some extent

simulate those of the animals and the trees, and who often con-sider themselves

equal to the latter.

Men who are bound to nature and to the oppressor in this way must come to

discern themselves as persons prevented from being. And discovering themselves

means in the first instance, discovering themselves as Pedro, as Antonio, or as

Josefa. This discovery implies a different perception of the meaning of

designations’: the words ‘world’, ‘men’, ‘culture’, ‘tree’, ‘work *,’animal’,

reassume their true significance. The peasants now see themselves as transformers

of reality (previously a mysterious entity) through their creative labour. They

discover that - as men - they can no longer continue to be ‘things’ possessed by

others; and they can move from consciousness of themselves as oppressed

individuals to the consciousness of an oppressed class.

Any attempt to unify the peasants based on activist methods which rely on

‘slogans’ and do not deal with these fundamental aspects produces a mere

juxtaposition of individuals, giving a purely mechanistic character to their action.

The unity of the oppressed occurs at the human level, not at the level of things. It

occurs in a reality which is only authentically comprehended in the dialectic

between the sub- and superstructure.

In order for the oppressed to unite, they must first cut the umbilical cord of

magic and myth which binds them to the world of oppression; the unity which

links them to each other must be of a different nature. To achieve this

indispensable unity the revolutionary process must be, from the beginning, cultural

action. The methods used to achieve the unity of the oppressed will depend on the

latter’s\ historical and existential experience within the social structure.

Peasants live in a ‘closed’ reality with a single, compact centre of oppressive

decision; the urban oppressed live in an expanding context in which the oppressive

command centre is plural and complex. Peasants are under the control of a

domi-nant figure who incarnates the oppressive system; in urban areas, the

oppressed are subjected to an ‘oppressive impersonality’. In both cases the

oppressive power is to a certain extent ‘invisible’; in the rural zone, because of its

proximity to the oppressed; in the cities, because of its dispersion.

Forms of cultural action in such different situations as these have nonetheless

the same objective: to clarify to the oppressed the objective situation which binds

them to the oppressors, visible or not. Only forms of action which avoid mere

speech-making and ineffective ‘blah’ on the one hand, and mechan-istic activism

on the other, can also oppose the divisive action of the dominant elites and move

towards the unity of the oppressed.

Organization

In the theory of anti-dialogical action, manipulation is indis-pensable to

conquest and domination; in the dialogical theory of action the organization of the

people presents the antagon-istic opposite of this manipulation. Organization is not

only directly linked to unity, but is a natural development of that unity.

Accordingly, the leaders’ pursuit of unity is necessarily also an attempt to organize

the people, requiring witness to the fact that the struggle for liberation is a common

task. This con-stant, humble and courageous witness emerging from coopera-tion

in a shared effort-the liberation of men-avoids the danger of anti-dialogical control.

The form of witness may vary, depending on the historical conditions of any

society; witness itself, however, is an indispensable element of revolutionary

action.

In order to determine the what and how of that witness, it is therefore essential to

have an increasingly critical knowledge of the current historical context, the view

of the world held by the people, the principal contradiction of society, and the

principal aspect of that contradiction. Since these dimensions of witness are

historical, dialogical, and therefore dialectical, witness cannot simply import them

from other contexts without previously analysing its own. To do otherwise is to

absolutize and mythologize the relative; alienation then becomes unavoid-able.

Witness, in the dialogical theory of action, is one of the principal expressions of

the cultural and educational character of the revolution.

The essential elements of witness which do not vary historically include:

consistency between words and actions; boldness which urges the witness to

confront existence as a permanent risk; radicalization (not sectarianism) leading

both the witness and the ones receiving that witness to increasing action; courage

to love (which, far from being accommodation to an unjust world, is rather the

transformation of that world on be-half of the increasing liberation of men); and

faith in the people, since it is to them that witness is made - although witness to the

people, because of their dialectical relations with the dominant elites, also affects

the latter (who respond to that witness in their customary way).

All authentic (that is, critical) witness involves the daring to run risks, including

the possibility that the leaders will not always win the immediate adherence of the

people. Witness which has not borne fruit at a certain moment and under certain

conditions is not thereby rendered incapable of bearing fruit tomorrow. Since

witness is not an abstract gesture, but an action - a confrontation with the world

and with men - it is not static. It is a dynamic element which becomes part of the

societal context in which it occurred; from that moment, it does not cease to affect

that context.

In anti-dialogical action, manipulation anaesthetizes the people and facilitates

their domination; in dialogical action manipulation is superseded by authentic

organization. In anti-dialogical action, manipulation serves the ends of conquest; in

dialogical action, daring and loving witness serve the ends of organization.

For the dominant elites, organization means organizing themselves. For the

revolutionary leaders, organization means organizing themselves with the people.

In the first event, the dominant elite increasingly structures its power so that it can

more efficiently dominate and depersonalize; in the second, organization only

corresponds to its nature and objective if in itself it constitutes the practice of

freedom. Accordingly, the discipline necessary to any organization must not be

confused with regimentation. It is quite true that without leadership, discipline,

determination, and objectives - without tasks to fulfil and accounts to be rendered -

an organization cannot survive, and revolutionary action is thereby diluted. This

fact, however, can never justify treating the people as things to be used. The people

are already depersonalized by oppression -If the revolutionary leaders manipulate

them, instead of working towards their conscientization, they negate the very

objective of organization (that is, liberation).

Organizing the people is the process in which the revolution-ary leaders, who

are also prevented from saying their own word, initiate the experience of learning

how to name the world. This is true learning experience, and therefore dialogical.

So it is that the leaders cannot say their word alone; they must say it with the

people. Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions,

do not organize the people they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they

liberated : they oppress.

The fact that the leaders who organize the people do not have the right to

arbitrarily impose their word does not mean that they must therefore take a

liberalist position which would encourage licence among the people, who are

accustomed to oppression. The dialogical theory of action opposes both

authoritarianism and licence, and thereby affirms authority and freedom. There is

no freedom without authority, but there is also no authority without freedom. All

freedom contains the possibility that under special circumstances (and at different

existential levels) it may become authority. Freedom and authority cannot be

isolated, but must be considered in relationship to each other.

Authentic authority is not affirmed as such by a mere transfer of power, but

through delegation or in sympathetic adherence. If authority is merely transferred

from one group to another, or is imposed upon the majority, it degenerates into

authori-tarianism. Authority can avoid conflict with freedom only if it is ‘freedom-

become-authority’. Hypertrophy of the one provokes atrophy of the other. Just as

authority cannot exist without freedom, and vice versa, authoritarianism cannot

exist without denying freedom, nor licence without denying authority.

In the theory of dialogical action, organization requires authority, so it cannot be

authoritarian; it requires freedom, so it cannot be licentious. Organization is, rather,

a highly educational process in which leaders and people together experience true

authority and freedom, which they then seek to establish in society by transforming

the reality which mediates them.

Cultural synthesis

Cultural action is always a systematic and deliberate form of action which

operates upon the social structure, either with the objective of preserving that

structure or of transforming it. As a form of deliberate and systematic action, all

cultural action has its theory which determines its ends and thereby defines its

methods. Cultural action either serves domination (consciously or unconsciously)

or it serves the liberation of men. As these dialectically opposed types of cultural

action operate in and upon the social structure, they create dialectical relations of

permanence and change.

The social structure, in order to be, must become; in other words, becoming is

the way the social structure expresses ‘duration’ in the Bergsonian sense of the

term.

Dialogical cultural action does not have as its aim the dis-appearance of the

permanence-change dialectic (an impossible aim, since disappearance of the

dialectic would require the disappearance of the social structure itself and thus of

men); it aims, rather, at surmounting the antagonistic contradictions of the social

structure, thereby achieving the liberation of men.

Anti-dialogical cultural action, on the other hand, aims at mythicizing such

contradictions, thereby hoping to avoid (or hinder in so far as possible) the radical

transformation of reality. Anti-dialogical action explicitly or implicitly aims to

preserve, within the social structure, situations which favour its own agents. While

the latter would never accept a transformation of the structure sufficiently radical

to overcome its antagonistic contradictions, they may accept reforms which do not

affect their power of decision over the oppressed. Hence, this modality of action

involves the conquest of the people, their division, their manipulation, and cultural

invasion. It is necessary and fundamentally an induced action. Dialogical action,

how-ever, supersedes any induced aspect. The incapacity of anti-dialogical cultural

action to supersede its induced character results from its objective: domination; the

capacity of dialogical cultural action to do this lies in its objective: liberation.

In cultural invasion, the actors draw the thematic content of their action from

their own values and ideology; their starting point is their own world, from which

they enter the world of those they invade. In cultural synthesis, the actors who

come from ‘another world’ to the world of the people do so not as invaders. They

do not come to teach or to transmit or to give anything, but rather to learn, with the

people, about the people’s world.

In cultural invasion the actors (who need not even go per-sonally to the invaded

culture; increasingly, their action is carried out by technological instruments)

superimpose themselves on the people, who are assigned the role of spectators, of

objects. In cultural synthesis, the actors become integrated with the people, who

are co-authors of the action that both perform upon the world.

In cultural invasion, both the spectators and the reality to be preserved are

objects of the actors’ action. In cultural synthesis, there are no spectators; the

object of the actors’ action is the reality to be transformed for the liberation of

men.

Cultural synthesis is thus a mode of action for confronting culture itself, as the

preserver of the very structures by which it was formed. Cultural action, as

historical action, is an instrument for superseding the dominant alienated and

alienating culture. In this sense, every authentic revolution is a cultural revolution.

The investigation of the people’s generative themes or meaningful thematics

described in chapter 3 constitutes the starting point for the process of action as

cultural synthesis. Indeed, it is not really possible to divide this process into two

separate steps: first, thematic investigation, and then action as cultural synthesis.

Such a dichotomy would imply an initial phase in which the people, as passive

objects, would be studied, analysed, and investigated by the investigators - a

procedure congruent with anti-dialogical action. Such division would lead to the

naive conclusion that action as synthesis follows from action as invasion.

In dialogical theory, this division cannot occur. The Subjects of thematic

investigation are not only the professional investi-gators but also the men of the

people whose thematic universe is being sought. Investigation - the first moment of

action as cultural synthesis - establishes a climate of creativity which will tend to

develop in the subsequent stages of action. Such a climate does not exist in cultural

invasion, which through alienation kills the creative enthusiasm of those who are

invaded, leaving them hopeless and fearful of risking experimentation, without

which there is no true creativity.

Those who are invaded, whatever their level, rarely go beyond the models which

the invaders prescribe for them. In cultural synthesis there are no invaders; hence,

there are no imposed models. In their stead, there are actors who critically analyse

reality (never separating this analysis from action) and inter-vene as Subjects in the

historical process.

Instead of following predetermined plans, leaders and people, mutually

identified, together create the guidelines of their action. In this synthesis, leaders

and people are somehow reborn in new knowledge and new action. Knowledge of

the alienating culture leads to transforming action resulting in a culture which is

being freed from alienation. The more sophisticated knowledge of the leaders is

remade in the empirical knowledge of the people, while the latter is refined by the

former.

In cultural synthesis - and only in cultural synthesis - it is possible to resolve the

contradiction between the world view of the leaders and that of the people, to the

enrichment of both. Cultural synthesis does not deny the differences between the

two views; indeed, it is based on these differences. It does deny the invasion of one

by the other, but affirms the undeniable support each gives to the other.

Revolutionary leaders must avoid organizing themselves apart from the people;

whatever contradiction to the people may occur fortuitously, due to certain

historical conditions, must be solved - not augmented by the cultural invasion of an

imposed relationship. Cultural synthesis is the only way.

Revolutionary leaders commit many errors and miscalculations by not taking

into account something as real as the people’s view of the world: a view which

explicitly and implicitly contains their concerns, their doubts, their hopes, their

way of seeing the leaders, their perceptions of themselves and of the oppressors,

their religious beliefs (almost always syncretic), their fatalism, their rebellious

reactions. None of these elements can be seen separately, for in interaction all of

them compose a totality. The oppressor is interested in knowing this totality only

as an aid to his action of invasion in order to dominate or preserve domination. For

the revolutionary leaders, the knowledge of this totality is indispensable to their

action as cultural synthesis.

Cultural synthesis (precisely because it is a synthesis) does not mean that the

objectives of revolutionary action should be limited by the aspirations expressed in

the world view of the people. If this were to happen (in the guise of respect for that

view), the revolutionary leaders would be passively bound to that vision. Neither

invasion by the leaders of the people’s world view nor mere adaptation by the

leaders to the (often naive) aspirations of the people is acceptable.

To be concrete: if at a given historical moment the basic aspiration of the people

goes no further than a demand for salary increases, the leaders can commit one of

two errors. They can limit their action to stimulating this one demand or they can

overrule this popular aspiration and substitute something more far-reaching - but

something which has not yet come to the forefront of the people’s attention. In the

first case, the revolutionary leaders follow a line of adaptation to the people’s

demands. In the second case, by not respecting the aspirations of the people, they

fall into cultural invasion.

The solution lies in synthesis: the leaders must on the one hand identify with the

people’s demand for higher salaries, while on the other they must set the meaning

of that very demand as a problem. By doing this, the leaders pose as a problem a

real, concrete, historical situation of which the salary demand is one dimension. It

will thereby become clear that salary demands alone cannot comprise a definitive

solution. The essence of this solution can be found in the previously cited

statement by bishops of the Third World that ‘if the workers do not somehow come

to be owners of their own labour, all structural reforms will be ineffective ... they

[must] be owners, not sellers, of their labour ... [for] any purchase or sale of labour

is a type of slavery’.

To achieve critical consciousness of the facts that it is neces-sary to be the

‘owner of one’s own labour’, that labour ‘con-stitutes part of the human person’,

and that a human being can neither be sold nor can he sell himself, is to go a step

beyond the deception of palliative solutions. It is to engage in authentic

transformation of reality in order, by humanizing that reality, to humanize men.

In the anti-dialogical theory of action, cultural invasion serves the ends of

manipulation, which in turn serves the ends pf conquest, and conquest serves the

ends of domination. Cultural synthesis serves the ends of organization;

organization serves the ends of liberation.

This work deals with a very obvious truth: just as the oppressor, in order to

oppress, needs a theory of oppressive action, so the oppressed, in order to become

free, also need a theory of action.

The oppressor elaborates his theory of action without the people, for he stands

against them. Nor can the people - as long as they are crushed and oppressed,

internalizing the image of the oppressor - construct by themselves the theory of

their liberating action. Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary

leaders - in their communion, in their praxis can this theory be built.

End